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