Christoph
Clavius
A Scientist Between Copenicus and Galileo
The Bamberg Cathedral
The Canonization of Henry II and Kunigunde
The Bamberg Cathedral School
in the Early Middle Ages
A detail of Pope Gregory XIII's tomb showing the Bamberg Mathematician Clavius Presenting the Pope with the Gregorian Calendar
Christoph Clavius was born March 25 1538 in the German town of Bamberg. In almost every book he published he proudly styled himself Christophorus Clavius Bambergensis. He dedicated successive editions of his book Sphaera to the archbishops of Bamberg and writes fondly of the town and his dedicatory letters. A slightly more subtle hint appears on the title page of Clavius' connected works, entitled Opera Mathematica. The illustrations include, near the top, the figures of St. Heinrich (the 11th century Holy Roman Emperor Henry II) and his consort St. Kunigunde. Both are prominently entombed in a magnificent 13th century Bamberg Cathedral, which must have been a familiar and impressive place for the young Clavius.
We have no information about Clavius' early years in Bamberg. Though Bamberg was the site of a prominent Jesuit school, it could not have been Clavius' introduction to the order because the school was not founded until 1611. By February 1555, when Clavius was still just 16, he was in Rome where on April 12 he was received into the Society of Jesus by Ignatius Loyola himself. The Jesuits, almost destitute, could not afford to maintain all their young recruits in Rome, and for this reason many were dispersed to other Jesuit colleges. Thus Clavius was sent off to study at the University of Coimbra, in Portugal, where he enrolled in 1556.
Given the early age at which Clavius left Bamberg, it seems unlikely that he acquired much mathematical training there. However a clue in Clavius' later writings may reveal Bamberg as an early influence. The Bamberger Rechenbuch (Bamberg Accounting Book, published in Bamberg in 1483) a manual of practical arithmetic for business calculations, contains a very early representation of common factions in something resembling the modern form. The two terms of the fraction are written as half-size numerals one above the other, but without the horizontal fraction bought of modern notation. A very similar notation appears in Clavius' Epitome arithmeticae practicae (published in Rome in 1583) in the discussion of the concept of fractional fractions. If Clavius' use of this notation is a reflection of notational practices at Bamberg, then its commercial sector may have been an important early influence, perhaps through a practical arithmetic text, on Clavius' later mathematical interests.
Another suggestion of the activity of Bamberg's mathematical community comes from Ernst Zinner's survey of works on instruments in the early 16th century. Of the mere handful of books on astrolabe's published in German speaking areas in that century, he notes that one of them appear in Bamberg in 1525. Zinner also found that Bamberg was a minor center for publication of astronomical yearbooks and a few other astronomical and mathematical text from 1481 until 1525 or so. So although Clavius left Bamberg at the age of 16 and, as far as we know, never returned, there is enough evidence of mathematical and scientific activity at Bamberg to suggest that it was an early influence on his professional inclinations.
Several anecdotes suggest Clavius' modesty and stolid piety. When the people of Bamberg invited Clavius to visit the town on the occasion of the dedication of a monument celebrating their famous mathematician, he declined the honor saying that his only desire was to remain at his post and continue his work. Yet another story tells the Clavius was so piously attentive to his priestly vows that when he chanced to see a woman on the street outside one of his chamber's windows he had the aperture boarded shut so as to prevent such an intrusion ever happening again. Once the Pope asked Clavius whether he had good living quarters, comfortable and suited to his studies. "Good? The best!" Responded the mathematician. "All I have to do is move my bed from one room to another when it rains at night so that the water doesn't fall on my head."
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