COPERNICUS, NICOLAUS. - Astronomer and canon, b. 19 February 1473 at Thorn (Toruń) in western Prussia, to Nicolaus and Barbara Watzelrode; d. at Frauenburg on 24 May 1543. After his classical studies he applied himself also to philosophy and astronomy at the University of Cracow, where he is found in 1491. He followed his uncle Lucas Watzelrode to Ermland when the latter was appointed bishop there.
During this time he translated the letters of Theophylact Simocatta: the first Greek book translated into Latin in the country washed by the Vistula. In 1497, having received the minor orders, he was appointed canon of Frauenburg (diocese of Ermland); but in the meantime he had gone to Italy (1496); he had studied theology and canon law at Bologna and at Ferrara, also attending the lectures of Domenico Maria Novara, an astronomer of worth. In 1500 he gave lectures on astronomy at the Sapienza in Rome; finally at Padua on 31 May 1503 he obtained his degree in law. He applied himself also to medicine and in fact practiced this art in his homeland, where he is found in 1505. With few and modest instruments he set up an observatory for himself at Frauenburg on a tower near the Cathedral, and he alternated his astronomical observations with the various affairs he had to attend to as a canon. From the study of the precession of the equinoxes, in which Novara had initiated him, and of the question of Easter, he was led to the revision of all the doctrines concerning celestial motions. Around 1530 he began to compose his capital work: De revolutionibus orbium coelestium libri sex, to which he had prefaced an explanatory commentariolus. Cardinal Niccolò Schönberg, a Dominican, learned of it in 1536 and approved it, as did Georg Joachim Rheticus in 1539, who published a compendium of it; but the printing done at Nuremberg was not ready until 1543, and C. barely had time to see the first copies when he was overtaken by death. C., who was always a faithful Catholic, wished to dedicate his work to Paul III, a passionate devotee of astronomical sciences; however, it appeared preceded by a preface by the Lutheran Andreas Osiander, with which it was intended to suggest that C. had proposed his system as a pure and simple hypothesis; the Lutherans in fact immediately thought that it was in conflict with the Bible.
As is well known, C., in opposition to the astronomical system of Ptolemy, then universally accepted in the schools, which placed the earth at the center of the universe, upheld the heliocentric system which placed the sun as the center, around which the earth with its satellite revolved together with the other planets. Since it had not yet been discovered by Kepler that the orbits of the planets were ellipses and not circles, C.'s system presented difficulties, but it was far simpler and more persuasive than the very complicated Ptolemaic system. However, C.'s system met at first with quite limited favor; his work was printed at Nuremberg in 1543 by his faithful disciple Rheticus and at Amsterdam by Nicolaus Müller in 1614 and 1630, and then not again until 1854 and 1873 (at Leipzig from the original manuscript). In Italy too it passed almost unnoticed until Galileo became its supporter, giving the system new support and clarifications with his discoveries. - See plate XVIII.
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