On the evening of Sunday, 29 December 1566, in the German university town of Rostock, the twenty-year-old Danish student Tycho Brahe and his slightly older Danish cousin Manderup Parsberg met at a private house belonging to a Professor Lukas Bachmeister, agreed on the formal challenge they had given each other two evenings earlier, walked together into the back garden of the house, and fought a sword duel by torchlight over a mathematical disagreement. The garden was small. The light was uncertain. The duel lasted approximately ninety seconds. Parsberg’s rapier, on what was probably the third or fourth exchange, caught Tycho across the face and sliced off a substantial portion of the bridge of his nose.
Both men dropped their weapons. Bachmeister and his servants came running. Tycho was carried inside. The wound was packed with cloth and silver wire to stop the bleeding. A surgeon was summoned from the town. The cousins reconciled within days. Both went on to long careers — Parsberg as a Danish royal councilor, Tycho as the most accomplished astronomer of the late sixteenth century. Tycho wore a prosthetic over the wound for the next thirty-five years.
The disagreement they had fought over was not a quarrel over a woman or a political slight. It was, by every contemporary account that survives, about who had the better mathematical proof of a specific geometrical proposition. The cousins had begun arguing about it at a wedding ten days earlier and had been unable to settle the matter in conversation. They had agreed to put it to the test of arms.
This is, by reasonable margin, the most academic motive for a duel in the entire history of European fencing.
The disagreement, the wedding, and the cousin
Tycho and Manderup had been fellow students at Rostock since the autumn of 1566 — Tycho enrolled to study law (at his uncle’s insistence), Parsberg to study the standard humanistic curriculum. Both were members of the small expatriate community of young Danish noblemen who travelled through the German Protestant universities in the years after the Reformation. They had been friendly. They had drunk together. They were, in addition to being cousins through Tycho’s father’s family, also distantly connected through several aristocratic marriages.
The wedding had been on 10 December 1566, at the Rostock house of the Danish theologian Lucas Bacmeister. Both Tycho and Parsberg had attended. They had drunk substantially. They had argued, in the way that young men with classical educations sometimes do, about a problem from Greek mathematics — specifically (in the most carefully attested reconstruction) a question about the volumes of certain conic sections. Tycho had asserted one solution. Parsberg had asserted another. Neither had been able to convince the other.
The argument had broken up at the end of the wedding without resolution. They had met again on 27 December at the same house and resumed the argument, this time with witnesses. By the evening’s end the dispute had become personal. The cousins had agreed that the matter could not be settled by discussion and would have to be resolved on the field of honor.
Pierre Gassendi, writing Tycho’s biography in 1654 — eighty-eight years after the duel and based on family papers preserved in Denmark — records that the argument had at some point shifted from the original mathematical question to the more inflammatory question of which of the two cousins was the better mathematician. This second formulation, Gassendi observed dryly, was the kind of question on which two young Renaissance noblemen might decide a duel was the only way to obtain a definitive answer.
The duel and the surgeon
The fight took place in Bachmeister’s back garden at about 7:00 p.m. on 29 December 1566. The conditions favored neither swordsman. The torch one of the servants was holding cast more shadow than light. The cousins had fought several brief exchanges before Parsberg’s blade made contact with Tycho’s face. By all accounts the cut was unintentional — Parsberg had been aiming at Tycho’s sword arm and had been unable to see clearly where his point was going.
The wound bled severely. Tycho was carried into the house and placed in Bachmeister’s parlor. A Rostock surgeon named Walram Hellingius arrived within the hour. He cleaned the wound, stitched what could be stitched, and packed the remaining cavity. The bridge of the nose — the bone and cartilage between the eyes — had been sliced through. There was no way in 1566 medicine to reconstruct it.
Over the following weeks, Tycho commissioned a prosthetic. The first version was probably a simple pasted-on piece of painted wax or plaster, used as a stopgap during the initial healing. The permanent prosthesis, which he wore for the rest of his life, was a more elaborate construction: a small concave piece of metal, shaped to match the missing portion of nose, painted to approximate skin color, and held in place with a wax-based adhesive. Tycho kept a small leather case of spare noses and a pot of adhesive on his person for daily reapplication.
The contemporary descriptions of the prosthesis all say it was made of silver and gold. The standard biographical accounts repeated this characterization for four hundred years. It became one of the famous details of Tycho’s life — the silver-and-gold nose — and contributed substantially to his reputation as a flamboyant Renaissance aristocrat with a taste for ostentation.
In 2010, when Tycho’s grave at the Týn Church in Prague was opened by a Danish-Czech archaeological team for medical analysis, the team scraped a small sample of greenish staining from the bones around the nasal cavity of the skeleton. The staining was the residue of metallic corrosion from the prosthetic, transferred over four centuries of contact between the bone and the prosthesis. Chemical analysis showed the residue to be primarily copper, with a small amount of zinc — in other words, brass.
Tycho’s day-to-day nose was not silver and gold. It was a plain, painted piece of brass. The silver-and-gold story is probably true for a single fancier nose — a special-occasion prosthesis Tycho wore at court — that he is documented to have owned. But the working nose he wore most of his life, the one that left the greenish stain on his nasal bones, was a piece of common alloy.
What happened to the cousin
Manderup Parsberg paid the surgeon’s fees. He paid for the prosthetics. He did not, by the surviving correspondence, ever pay Tycho a financial settlement for the injury — possibly because both men understood the wound to have been a duel-related accident rather than a deliberate assault, and possibly because both men had a financial interest in not making the incident a matter of formal Danish legal record.
The cousins reconciled within months. They continued to correspond throughout their lives. Parsberg went home to Denmark, married well, and became a member of the Danish State Council under Christian IV. He died in 1625, twenty-four years after Tycho. There is a portrait of him in middle age in the National Gallery of Denmark in Copenhagen. He is shown wearing court dress, with a small enameled emblem at his neck. His face is intact.
The mathematical disagreement that had caused the duel was never formally resolved. Neither Tycho nor Parsberg ever returned to the question in print. We do not know which of them had been right.