Nicolaus Copernicus
Nicolaus Copernicus[b] (19 February 1473 – 24 May 1543) was a Renaissance polymath who formulated a model of the universe that placed the Sun rather than Earth at its center. The publication of Copernicus’s model in his book De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres), just before his death in 1543, was a major event in the history of science, triggering the Copernican Revolution and making a pioneering contribution to the Scientific Revolution.[6] Though a similar heliocentric model had been developed eighteen centuries earlier by Aristarchus of Samos, an ancient Greek astronomer, Copernicus likely arrived at his model independently.[7][c][d][e]
Copernicus was born and died in Royal Prussia, a semiautonomous and multilingual region created within the Crown of the Kingdom of Poland from lands regained from the Teutonic Order after the Thirteen Years’ War.
A polyglot and polymath, he obtained a doctorate in canon law and was a mathematician, astronomer, physician, classics scholar, translator, governor, diplomat, and economist. From 1497 he was a Warmian Cathedral chapter canon. In 1517 he derived a quantity theory of money—a key concept in economics—and in 1519 he formulated an economic principle that later came to be called Gresham’s law.[f]
Life
Nicolaus Copernicus was born on 19 February 1473 in the city of Toruń (Thorn), in the province of Royal Prussia, in the Crown of the Kingdom of Poland,[10][11] to German-speaking parents.[12]
His father was a merchant from Kraków and his mother was the daughter of a wealthy Toruń merchant.[13] Nicolaus was the youngest of four children. His brother Andreas (Andrew) became an Augustinian canon at Frombork (Frauenburg).[13] His sister Barbara, named after her mother, became a Benedictine nun and, in her final years, prioress of a convent in Chełmno (Kulm); she died after 1517.[13] His sister Katharina married the businessman and Toruń city councilor Barthel Gertner and left five children, whom Copernicus looked after to the end of his life.[13] Copernicus never married and is not known to have had children, but from at least 1531 until 1539 his relations with Anna Schilling, a live-in housekeeper, were seen as scandalous by two bishops of Warmia who urged him over the years to break off relations with his “mistress”.[14]
Father’s family
Copernicus’s father’s family originally migrated to Silesia in the thirteenth century.[15] The family can be traced to a village between Nysa (Neiße) and Prudnik (Neustadt). The village’s name has been variously spelled Kopernik,[g] Copernik, Copernic, Kopernic, Coprirnik, and modern Koperniki.[17]
In the 14th century, members of the family began moving to various other Silesian cities, to the Polish capital, Kraków (1367), and to Toruń (1400).[17] In 1396, Niklas Koppernigk, the astronomer’s great-great-grandfather, became a burgher of Kraków.[15] The father, likewise named Niklas Koppernigk,[18] likely the son of Jan (or Johann),[19] was first recorded in Kraków in 1448.[15]
Nicolaus was named after his father, who appears in records for the first time as a well-to-do merchant who dealt in copper, selling it mostly in Danzig (Gdańsk).[20][21] He moved from Kraków to Toruń around 1458.[22] Toruń, situated on the Vistula River, was at that time embroiled in the Thirteen Years’ War, in which the Kingdom of Poland and the Prussian Confederation, an alliance of Prussian cities, gentry and clergy, fought the Teutonic Order over control of the region. In this war, Hanseatic cities like Danzig and Toruń, Nicolaus Copernicus’s hometown, chose to support the Polish King, Casimir IV Jagiellon, who promised to respect the cities’ traditional vast independence, which the Teutonic Order had challenged. Nicolaus’s father was actively engaged in the politics of the day and supported Poland and the cities against the Teutonic Order.[23] In 1454 he mediated negotiations between Poland’s Cardinal Zbigniew Oleśnicki and the Prussian cities for repayment of war loans.[17] In the Second Peace of Thorn (1466), the Teutonic Order formally renounced all claims to the conquered lands, which returned to Poland as Royal Prussia and remained part of it until the First (1772) and Second (1793) Partitions of Poland.
Copernicus’s father married Barbara Watzenrode, the astronomer’s mother, between 1461 and 1464.[17] He died about 1483.[13]
Mother’s family
Nicolaus’s mother, Barbara Watzenrode, was the daughter of a wealthy Toruń patrician and city councillor, Lucas Watzenrode the Elder (deceased 1462), and Katarzyna (widow of Jan Peckau), mentioned in other sources as Katarzyna Rüdiger gente Modlibóg (deceased 1476).[13] The Modlibógs were a prominent Polish family who had been well known in Poland’s history since 1271.[24] The Watzenrode family, like the Kopernik family, had come from Silesia from near Schweidnitz (Świdnica), and after 1360 had settled in Toruń. They soon became one of the wealthiest and most influential patrician families.[13] Through the Watzenrodes’ extensive family relationships by marriage, Copernicus was related to wealthy families of Toruń (Thorn), Danzig (Gdansk) and Elbing (Elbląg), and to prominent Polish noble families of Prussia: the Czapskis, Działyńskis, Konopackis and Kościeleckis.[13] Lucas and Katherine had three children: Lucas Watzenrode the Younger (1447–1512), who would become Bishop of Warmia and Copernicus’s patron; Barbara, the astronomer’s mother (deceased after 1495); and Christina (deceased before 1502), who in 1459 married the Toruń merchant and mayor, Tiedeman von Allen.[13]
Lucas Watzenrode the Elder, a wealthy merchant and in 1439–62 president of the judicial bench, was a decided opponent of the Teutonic Knights.[13] In 1453 he was the delegate from Toruń at the Grudziądz (Graudenz) conference that planned the uprising against them.[13] During the ensuing Thirteen Years’ War, he actively supported the Prussian cities’ war effort with substantial monetary subsidies (only part of which he later re-claimed), with political activity in Toruń and Danzig, and by personally fighting in battles at Łasin (Lessen) and Malbork (Marienburg).[13] He died in 1462.[13]
Lucas Watzenrode the Younger, the astronomer’s maternal uncle and patron, was educated at the University of Kraków and at the universities of Cologne and Bologna. He was a bitter opponent of the Teutonic Order,[h] and its Grand Master once referred to him as “the devil incarnate”.[i] In 1489 Watzenrode was elected Bishop of Warmia (Ermeland, Ermland) against the preference of King Casimir IV, who had hoped to install his own son in that seat.[27] As a result, Watzenrode quarreled with the king until Casimir IV’s death three years later.[28] Watzenrode was then able to form close relations with three successive Polish monarchs: John I Albert, Alexander Jagiellon, and Sigismund I the Old. He was a friend and key advisor to each ruler, and his influence greatly strengthened the ties between Warmia and Poland proper.[29] Watzenrode came to be considered the most powerful man in Warmia, and his wealth, connections and influence allowed him to secure Copernicus’s education and career as a canon at Frombork Cathedral.[27][j]
Education
Early education
Copernicus’s father died around 1483, when the boy was 10. His maternal uncle, Lucas Watzenrode the Younger (1447–1512), took Copernicus under his wing and saw to his education and career.[13] Six years later, Watzenrode was elected Bishop of Warmia. Watzenrode maintained contacts with leading intellectual figures in Poland and was a friend of the influential Italian-born humanist and Kraków courtier Filippo Buonaccorsi.[31] There are no surviving primary documents on the early years of Copernicus’s childhood and education.[13] Copernicus biographers assume that Watzenrode first sent young Copernicus to St. John’s School, at Toruń, where he himself had been a master.[13] Later, according to Armitage,[k] the boy attended the Cathedral School at Włocławek, up the Vistula River from Toruń, which prepared pupils for entrance to the University of Kraków.[32]
University of Kraków 1491–1495
In the winter semester of 1491–92 Copernicus, as “Nicolaus Nicolai de Thuronia”, matriculated together with his brother Andrew at the University of Kraków.[13] Copernicus began his studies in the Department of Arts (from the fall of 1491, presumably until the summer or fall of 1495) in the heyday of the Kraków astronomical-mathematical school, acquiring the foundations for his subsequent mathematical achievements.[13] According to a later but credible tradition (Jan Brożek), Copernicus was a pupil of Albert Brudzewski, who by then (from 1491) was a professor of Aristotelian philosophy but taught astronomy privately outside the university; Copernicus became familiar with Brudzewski’s widely read commentary to Georg von Peuerbach‘s Theoricæ novæ planetarum and almost certainly attended the lectures of Bernard of Biskupie and Wojciech Krypa of Szamotuły, and probably other astronomical lectures by Jan of Głogów, Michał of Wrocław (Breslau), Wojciech of Pniewy, and Marcin Bylica of Olkusz.[33]