Negotiating Knowledge in Early Modern Empires

A Decentered View

L. Kontler, A. Romano, S. Sebastiani, B. Török, L. Kontler, A. Romano, S. Sebastiani, B. Török

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137484017
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Modern History
• Index: History

This volume takes a decentered look at early modern empires and rejects the center/periphery divide. With an unconventional geographical set of cases, including the Holy Roman Empire, the Habsburg, Iberian, French and British empires, as well as China, contributors seize the spatial dynamics of the scientific enterprise.

Part I

Negotiation of (Trans-)Imperial Patronage

1

Was Astronomy the Science of Empires? An Eighteenth-Century Debate in View of the Cases of Tycho and Galileo

Gábor Almási

The debate this chapter is going to reconstruct happened between two eighteenth-century astronomers, the Italian Catholic priest Giuseppe Toaldo (1719–1797), professor of “astronomy and meteors” at the University of Padua, and the Frenchman Jean-Sylvain Bailly (1736–1793), full member of the Academy of Sciences and the French Academy as well as later president of the National Assembly and first mayor of Paris.¹ The controversy concerned the history of astronomy, in particular the question whether monarchies were more supportive of the advancement of astronomy than republics. Bailly argued in his monumental history of astronomy that experimental and observational sciences advanced better in monarchies than in republics. It is no wonder he had little respect for ancient Roman astronomy, by which he meant Republican Rome:

[In the Roman republic] one cultivated eloquence as it led to dignities. But if someone searched for glory in a scientific career he would not have found it: his fellow citizens would not have noticed him. This is what regards the sciences in general, but one may also add that those sciences which are founded on observation and experience, and which, as a consequence, demand dedication and work, like the study of the sky, do not make much progress in republics. Their utility, which almost always depends on their perfection, is too distant to impress the multitude.²

Experimental and observational sciences better suited monarchies, where royal patronage and example could inspire men of genius; see the Medici or Louis XIV.³

When Giuseppe Toaldo read Bailly’s history in the French original he decided to defend his state and prepared an essay on Venice’s merits in astronomy.⁴ While it seemed easy to defend republics in general, a greater part of the defense of Venetian science concerned travel writers and geographers and had little to say of astronomy. Moreover, Toaldo’s examples were often thwarted through the muddling of private and state patronage.⁵ Toaldo was aware of these weaknesses and admitted that listing examples of private individuals and private patronage would not satisfy Mr. Bailly, who would argue that republics care chiefly about their commercial interests, the preservation of public order, and therefore dislike novelties. Yet, as the reasoning went, Venice was always generous toward all the sciences, even if it did not reveal entusiasmo, “which might be a vice and surely a danger.”⁶ Toaldo confirmed that two examples would suffice to convince the reader: one concerned Galileo Galilei, the other Tycho Brahe. However, concerning Galileo he was curiously short. He did not want to emphasize Galileo’s invitation to the University of Padua, at the time before he became famous. Yet, it was in Venice’s favor that she expressed her appreciation to Galileo through salary raises.⁷ Tolado argued that Galileo later suffered for his ingratitude, abandoning such a generous lord (as the state of Venice), which could have also protected him against future persecutions.

Of the two stories by Toaldo, Tycho’s appears outwardly more convincing. Toaldo claimed that Venice had spontaneously made a decree to support the Danish astronomer in realizing his mission to Alexandria, where he desired to carry out astronomical observations. Recent scholarship, however, has undermined his thesis, in fact, showing it to be mistaken.⁸ While Tycho’s Astronomiae Instauratae Mechanica (1598) makes an indirect reference to a positive decision in Venice, it also makes it clear that no action had been taken.⁹ Apparently, one of the goals of Tycho’s book, which he sent as a gift copy also to Venice, was to enhance the commitment of the Republic. As we will see, we have good reason to agree with the assessment of Luisa Pigatto, that if Venice failed to support Tycho in realizing his abstract goals it was because the city cared only about the pragmatic uses of sciences.¹⁰

This chapter invites the reader to reinvestigate the cases Toaldo offered in defense of republican science. It will lead back to the sixteenth century and explain the context of the Alexandrian project in Tycho’s life and work, and analyze the patronage relationships that truly mattered to Tycho, which were pointing not toward Venice but the Holy Roman Empire. While studying the case of Tycho and interpreting Galileo’s attitude toward the Republic of Venice, the dynamics of scientific patronage will come into focus. In the context of late Renaissance science the importance of social and epistemological legitimation of princely patronage will be underscored, which seemingly supports Bailly’s monarchic claims. However, as will be pointed out, these claims derived from the philosophical agenda of an enlightened intellectual, which had a great deal more to do with the eighteenth-century French context, in which Bailly’s career unfolded, than with the “hard facts” of early modern astronomical practice. Thus, apart from reconsidering questions of early modern patronage in its political contexts, the cases of Tycho and Galileo will serve to highlight the ways early modern thinkers strove to negotiate fundamental concepts like science and republic, the meaning of which we are liable to take for granted.

Tycho’s scientific problems

In 1588, after many years of maturation, Tycho Brahe finally produced his first magnum opus, Concerning Recent Phenomena,¹¹ which dealt with the comet of 1577–1578 and included in its eighth chapter a new theory of the world system, which had the Sun revolve around a stable Earth and all other planets revolve around the Sun. The publication of the monograph led to the emergence of new challenges and expectations, which Tycho was eager to meet. As a result, he had four new strongly interrelated goals. First, criticism had to be vehemently refuted (most famously of John Craig). Second, the primacy of his natural philosophical claims needed to be confirmed (principally against Raimar Ursus). Third, his scholarly credit had to be further increased so that his scientific claims would not be questioned any more. These three tasks Tycho accomplished with admirable success through a clever use of the printing press, most importantly by publishing his scientific correspondence tailored precisely for these objectives.¹² However, he also had a fourth and more difficult task to resolve: to better explain and more firmly support his geo-heliocentric hypothesis.

The mission to Egypt, proposed to Venice and mentioned by Toaldo, could have been a contribution to this latter goal. The astronomical aim of the mission was rather complex, serving to discredit one of Copernicus’s starting points, which regarded certain irregularities in the motion of the fixed stars, which, as Tycho realized, was in correlation with the “intricate motion of the terrestrial axis.”¹³ The plan to newly measure the geographical longitude of Alexandria and some Italian cities and to confront the results with the data of Ptolemy and Pliny served to demonstrate that there was no oscillation of the terrestrial axis (resulting from the so-called theory of trepidation introduced in the ninth century). Another goal was to better base comparisons between ancient and modern observational data since Ptolemy had used Alexandria as his reference point. If Tycho’s thesis could be proven, it would demonstrate a new argument against Copernicus’s system of triple motion that had the heavy Earth rotate in such an absurd way.¹⁴ Moreover, it also would have been a triumph over Copernicus the observer, and confirm that Tycho, possessing infallible instruments, respected no authority but experience.

The above-mentioned set of new goals was thus largely the outcome of the publication of Concerning Recent Phenomena, which does not mean they were the only scientific goals Tycho had in mind. The “instauration of astronomy” could not be performed without a new lunar and solar theory firmly based on observational evidence, a new star catalogue, and practically more reliable observation of all celestial bodies. All in all these should have led to the drawing up of new tables, replacing both the Alfonsine and the Prutenic Tables. This was grand, aristocratic astronomy—as John Christianson has asserted—with a broad and clear vision. Responsible for its realization was the Institute of Uraniborg, with a staff of a dozen assistants and scholars financed basically by the state. As we know, this large project could in no way be finished in Tycho’s life, also because the institute was practically shut down when the young Danish king, Christian IV, finally took power. Spoiled by the rule of regency and unaccustomed to a new royal patron, the withdrawal of patronage took Tycho as a brutal surprise and he left his patria indignantly.¹⁵ Uraniborg would soon appear to him as a “Baconian dream.”

Placed in this larger context the planned mission to Egypt had only secondary importance. It was a piece of a larger picture, and, as a matter of fact, Alexandria was not the only place where he was planning to carry out measurements of longitudes. Tycho claimed to have worked out the longitude of Frombork (Frauenburg), a city that Copernicus previously measured...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• Part I   Negotiation of (Trans-)Imperial Patronage
• Part II   Competition of Empires: A Motor of Change in Knowledge Acquisition and Authentication
• Part III   Self-assertion of New Nodes of Knowledge Production
• Index