Electronic edition published by Cultural Heritage Langauge Technologies (with permission from Charles Scribners and Sons) and funded by the National Science Foundation International Digital Libraries Program. This text has been proofread to a low degree of accuracy. It was converted to electronic form using data entry.
AGRICOLA, GEORGIUS, also known as Georg
Bauerb. Glauchau, Germany, 24 March 1494; d.
Chemnitz, Germany [now Karl-Marx-Stadt, German
Democratic Republic], 21 November 1555), mining,
metallurgy.
Since there were too many demands on his time
in St. Joachimsthal, Agricola decided to return to
Chemnitz, to be town physician in this quieter,
smaller town on the northern slope of the Erzgebirge.
Chemnitz had a copper smelter which was used to
extract silver from the ore. Agricola's knowledge of
mining enabled him to profit from mining shares. He
always seemed to enter into the right partnership and
to avoid profitless ventures. By 1542 he was one of
the twelve richest inhabitants of Chemnitz. After
fifteen years of hard work he succeeded in finishing
a complete series of inquiries concerning the principles
of geology and mineralogy.
This series must be considered his greatest scientific
achievement. It had not yet been published when
Agricola became involved in the war of Emperor
Charles V against the Protestant Schmalkaldic
League: he was elected mayor of Chemnitz, appointed
a councillor to the court of Saxony, and sent as an
ambassador to the emperor and his younger brother
Ferdinand, king of Bohemia. For more than three
years Agricola was with the councillors of Moritz,
duke of Saxony, as one of the few Roman Catholic
representatives at the Protestant court. He never
wrote about the diplomatic missions he was charged
with, but we may assume that his parleys with the
Catholic emperor's commanders and diplomats were
effective. He was not able to return to his scientific
work until 1548, but new books appeared soon after:
De animantibus subterraneis (1549) and an enlarged
edition of De mensuris et ponderibus (1550).
In 1550 Agricola returned to St. Joachimsthal for
some weeks. He saw a very changed situation: the
prosperity was gone, nearly all of the ruling family
had been deposed or expelled, and some of the new
royal officials had not the slightest idea of the needs
of the town and its inhabitants. Agricola gave a
5,000-thaler credit—worth 2,000 cows in those days—to
the counts Schlick to promote prospecting for new
deposits, a search that was successful. He went home
to Chemnitz conscious of having done a good deed,
and with him he took the finished text of his chief
work, De re metallica libri XII, begun twenty years
before in St. Joachimsthal. During his visit to St.
Joachimsthal he had met the expert designer Blasius
Weffring, who spent the next three years illustrating
the text.
When the black plague spread through Saxony in
1552-1553, Agricola worked day and night, going
from the pesthouses to his family, always fearing that
he would bring the contagion with him; one daughter
did die of the plague. His first wife had died in 1541,
and the following year he had married Anna Schütz,
daughter of the guild master and smelter owner Ulrich
Schütz, who had entrusted his wife and children to
Agricola's guardianship when he died in 1534. His
studies during the plague led Agricola to publish De
peste libri III (1554).
Agricola could not retire until another work was
finished. In 1534 Georg the Whiskered, duke of
Saxony and a patron of the Catholic church, had
nominated Agricola as historiographer of the court
of Saxony, probably with the hope of discovering
genealogical claims on territories by heirs-at-law. For
twenty years Agricola studied yellowed parchments
and old chronicles. His honesty forbade him to conceal
the rulers' mistakes uncovered during his research:
he was a scholar, not a courtier. He recorded
his findings very frankly—much to the disappointment
of Augustus, third duke after Georg the
Whiskered. It is no wonder, then, that the Sippschaft
des Hausses zu Sachssen, an evaluation of all the
rulers of Saxony, remained unpublished until 1963.
Augustus ignored the dedication dated 9 August
1555, but more important is that of 18 March 1555,
for the second, enlarged edition of the mineralogical
works (1558). It contains Agricola's most quoted
words on peace and war, written before the Peace
of Augsburg (September 1555), when war between
the Catholic and Protestant confessions seemed imminent.
For Agricola, that decisive agreement was the
end of all his hopes for a reunion in faith. He fell
ill soon after and died after suffering a relapse in
November.
After Agricola's death the religious struggle renewed
over his corpse. The Protestant clergy refused
to allow his being buried in the parish church at
Chemnitz, an honor traditionally accorded to mayors;
and it was only through the intervention of his old
friend Julius von Pflug, bishop of Zeitz-Naumburg,
that he was interred in the cathedral at Zeitz.
Four months after his death, De re metallica libri
XII, illustrated with 292 woodcuts, appeared. A year
later an Old German translation by Philippus Bech
was published using the same woodcuts, which were
used for 101 years in seven editions.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
I. ORIGINAL WORKS.
Agricola's writings include De
prima ac simplici institutione grammatica (Leipzig, 1520);
Bermannus sive de re metallica dialogus (Basel, 1530; Paris,
1541); Oratio de bello adversus Turcam suscipiendo, original
Latin ed. (Basel, 1538), in Old German as Oration, Anrede
und Vermanung . . . widder den Türcken, Lorenz Bermann,
trans. (Dresden-Nuremberg, 1531); De mensuris et ponderibus
(Basel-Paris, 1533; Venice, 1535), reissued as De
mensuris et ponderibus Romanorum atque Graecorum libri