4.4 Marc welser

The Welser family was an old patrician family of Augsburg (southern Germany) and one of the wealthiest inGermany. His uncle, Bartholomeus had been an advisor to the Emperor Charles V and is said to have lent him twelve tons ofgold. In 1528 Bartholomeus sent a fleet to the New World and established a colony in Venezuela, which was taken over by theSpanish in 1555.

Marc Welser was sent to Rome at the age of 16 and became a very fine scholar of Greek andLatin; he also became fluent in Italian and studied antiquities. Upon his return to Augsburg, he became a lawyer andin 1592 became a member of the Senate of that city. He was elected the Senate's Council. His passion, however, was history,antiquities, and philology, and he corresponded on these subjects with the foremost scholars in Europe. He published books on theantiquities of Italy and Augsburg, on martyrs of the early church, and early German history. He also prepared an edition of EmperorFrederick II's (13th century) book On the Art of Hunting with Birds , and published several editions of hitherto unpublished Greek sources.

Among Welser's correspondents were a number of Jesuit scholars, such asChristoph Clavius. It was Clavius who assured Welser that Galileo's telescopic discoveries were real. At the end of 1611,the Jesuit mathematician Christoph Scheiner , wrote three letters on sunspots to Welser, and Welser published them early in 1612 at his own press. He sentGalileo a copy of the tract asking for his opinion. Galileo's responses and Scheiner's second tract on the subject werepublished by the Lyncean Academy in 1613 under the title Istoria e Dimostrazioni intorno alle Macchie Solari e loro Accidenti ("History and Demonstrations concerning Solar Spots and theirProperties"). Welser was elected at this time to the Lyncean Academy. After a long and very painful battle with gout, he diedin 1614. His collected works (the introduction to which is the source of virtually all information about his life) were publishedin 1682.