Martin Horký

Martin Horký (1578 – 1670s) was a Czech astronomer, astrologer, pamphleteer and traveler. He was notable for his early – and ultimately incorrect – criticism of Galileo Galilei's identification of the lunar mountains and Galilean moons of Jupiter. A pamphlet published by Horký, the Brevissima Peregrinatio contra Nuncium sidereum, is the first published work against a telescopic discovery.

Biography Early life and education Horký was born in Lochovice in the Kingdom of Bohemia, to a family with a Protestant background. He travelled around Europe in pursuit of medical training, eventually moving from his native Bohemia to Germany, France and then on to Bologna in Italy; Horký became a vocal supporter of Italian academic culture, and of the Bolognese republican government. He also maintained some contacts in Bohemia and considered himself a follower of Johannes Kepler, the leading astronomer at the imperial court in Prague. In 1609, he was among a group of notables invited to observe objects through Galileo's new telescope at the astronomer's home in Padua. The telescope was a new invention, having been invented in the Netherlands the previous year; the novelty of the invention, coupled with a huge demand for the devices, led to the frenzied development of new telescopes. Many different craftsmen were rapidly building their own, and by 1609 Galileo was proving to be among the most successful.

In April 1610, Horký was present at a meeting of astronomers and philosophers at the Palazzo Caprara Montpensier, in which Galileo presented evidence of his identification of the satellites of Jupiter and invited the assembled notables to use his telescope. Horký reported that both Magini and Massimo Caprara were unable to see evidence of Jupiter's satellites, and ascribed Galileo's findings to distortions or tricks of the glass. In personal correspondence with Kepler, Horký would go on to claim that Galileo had suffered a nervous breakdown as a result of the failed test, implied he had contracted the "French Disease" (syphilis), and that the Paduan professor was motivated by greed and personal glory to discover new astronomical bodies. The first known depiction of a modern telescope in Bruegel the Elder's 1609 work Landscape with the Chateau de Mariemont. The invention of the first telescope in the Netherlands in 1608 set off a flurry of competition in Europe to design and market the most advanced telescope. Initially discouraged from publishing the pamphlet by Magini, Horký persisted; eager to publish his work quickly, he travelled outside of Bolognese jurisdiction to avoid the publishing rules enforced by the Roman Inquisition and thus be able to go to print faster.

Peregrinatio Having been expelled from Bologna, Horký settled in Milan. Despite being deprived of Magini's financial support, his work—Brevissima Peregrinatio contra Nuncium sidereum—roughly translatable to "A very short journey against 'Starry Messenger'"—was published and distributed to notable astronomers across Europe. The pamphlet was heavily inspired by two contradictory sources: astrological principles (then considered a sister school to astronomy, now confirmed as pseudoscience) and the works of Johannes Kepler.

In his pamphlet, Horký argued that Galileo's discovery of the satellites of Jupiter (later confirmed to be the Galilean moons) and lunar mountains were provably false and misleading. From an academic standpoint, Horký also criticized Galileo's academic integrity, asking why Galileo had been the first to publish the discovery of the Jupiterian satellites and why no other astronomers had been able to corroborate the discovery. Horký implied that Galileo's lens making technique was flawed, and that this had led to him reading focal defects and distortions as astronomical bodies. To support this, Horký claimed that viewing several known stars through Galileo's telescope caused them to appear as doubles, thus indicating a flaw in the lens. He also heavily implied that Galileo's observations were driven by a personal desire for financial success and to curry political favor. The latter point was intended by Horký to deliver a political sting—Galileo had named the satellites of Jupiter the "Medician Stars" in honor of the Medici dukes of Tuscany, and it was widely speculated in contemporary Italian academic circles that Galileo was seeking to leave Padua and return to his native Tuscany with the aid of his former student, Cardinal Giovanni di Medici. Horký was in contact with a cluster of Florentines – a Vallombrosan monk (Orazio Morandi), Francesco Sizzi (later famed for discovering the movement of sunspots), an anonymous secretary, and Lodovico delle Colombe (a prominent Aristotelian physicist who would later push for Galileo to be investigated for heresy) – that readily supported his work. Kepler dismissed the claims in the Peregrinatio in a letter to Galileo later in 1610, describing them as "disgraceful pages that are simply a waste of time". The differences between the reception of Horký's work in Italy and Bohemia is seen by some sources as reflecting the increasing nationalist divides in 17th century Europe, as a heavily catholic, Spanish-dominated Italy entered into conflict with a religiously fractured Bohemia and Germany.

Later life Horký continued to pursue a career in medicine in Prague, where his lived until 1615. The following year, he was appointed to the Holy Roman embassy to the Ottoman Empire in Istanbul. In 1619 he returned to Bohemia, but with the spread of the Thirty Years' War, he was expelled. He authored a medical pamphlet on how to avoid the plague in Rostock in 1624, and then moved to Hamburg in the 1630s. From 1639 to 1645, Horký wrote and printed a series of astrological almanacs that attained some readership. He published a number of satirical astrological prophecies until his death sometime in the 1670s.

Published works Brevissima Peregrinatio contra Nuncium sidereum (1610) Chrysmologium Physico-Astromanticum (1639–1645)