Celestial Revolutionary

Copernicus, the Man and His Universe

John Freely

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780857734907
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Biografías históricas

In the spring of 1500, at the apex of the Renaissance, a papal secretary to the Borgia Pope, Alexander VI, wrote that "All the world is in Rome." Though no one knew it at the time, this included a young scholar by the name of Nicolaus Copernicus who would one day change the world. One of the greatest polymaths of his or any age - linguist, lawyer, doctor, diplomat, politician, mathematician, scientist, astronomer, artist, cleric - Copernicus gave the world arguably the most important scientific discovery of the modern era: that earth and the planets revolve around the sun and that the earth rotates on its axis once every 24 hours. His heliocentric theory and the discoveries that would follow ushered in the age of modern astronomy, often called the Copernican Age, and change the way we look at the universe forever. This brilliant and controversial belief - born of a fusion of the theories of the great scholars of antiquity and the knowledge of the medieval Islamic world - was immortalised in Copernicus' epic "De revolutionibus orbium coelestium", a book whose very first printed copy was placed into his hands at the moment of his death in 1543.Here, for the first time, is a biography of Copernicus that not only describes his theories but the life of the man himself and the epic, thrilling times in which he lived.

CHAPTER 1

‘THIS REMOTE CORNER OF THE EARTH’

Sigismondo de’ Conti, the papal secretary, noted in his chronicle during the spring of 1500 that ‘All the world is in Rome.’ A few days before Christmas 1499 Pope Alexander VI Borgia had declared that the following year would be a Jubilee, a period of special solemnity, in accordance with the decree published in 1471 by Pope Paul II which declared that each 25th year of the Christian era should be celebrated thusly. A special indulgence would be granted to all pilgrims who came to Rome and visited the four principal churches of the city, beginning with St Peter’s, whose doors would be open night and day throughout the Jubilee. The celebrations went on throughout the year, and on Easter Sunday an estimated 200,000 pilgrims thronged St Peter’s Square for the Pope’s blessing. The pious monk Petrus Delphinus was led to exclaim ‘God be praised, who has brought hither so many witnesses to the faith.’

Among the pilgrims was a young student named Nicolaus Copernicus, who had come from Poland to Italy in the autumn of 1496 to enrol in the faculty of law at the University of Bologna. The Italian Renaissance was in full bloom and Copernicus was in Rome at the height of its glory, before returning home the following year. He came back to Italy later that year to study medicine at the University of Padua for two years, before going to the University of Ferrara, where in 1503 he received a doctorate in law. He then returned to what he later called ‘this remote corner of the earth,’ in present-day northern Poland, where he would remain for the rest of his days.

One of the earliest biographies of Copernicus, a somewhat unreliable work in Latin published in 1654 by the French philosopher and astronomer Pierre Gassendi, gives his name as Nicolai Copernici, one of many forms that appear in various sources, including the astronomer’s own correspondence, Nicolaus Copernicus being the one now generally used.

Copernicus was born on 19 February 1473 in a house on Saint Anne’s Street in Thorn (Torun), a town on the Vistula, 110 miles south of Danzig (Gdansk) and 110 miles northwest of Warsaw, in what was then Royal Prussia, a region of the Kingdom of Poland. He was named after his father, Niklas Koppernigk, but afterwards followed the academic custom of the time and Latinized his name as Nicolaus Copernicus.

The Koppernigk family were originally German-speakers who migrated eastward to the province of Silesia in the thirteenth century, settling in the town known today as Koperniki, in present-day southeast Poland, close to the Czech border. Around 1350 the family moved to Krakow, capital of the Kingdom of Poland, where Niklas Koppernigk, the astronomer’s great-great grandfather, was made a citizen in 1396. The astronomer’s father, also named Niklas Koppernigk, first appears in records in 1448 as a prosperous merchant dealing in copper, which he sold mostly in Danzig, the Polish port city at the mouth of the Vistula. Around 1458 he moved from Krakow to Thorn, where a few years later he married Barbara, daughter of Lucas Watzenrode the Elder, a wealthy merchant and city councillor.

The Watzenrodes also originated from Silesia, having taken their name from their native village of Weizenrodau near Schweidnitz, which they left for Thorn after 1360. Lucas Watzenrode the Elder was born in Thorn in 1400 and in 1436 he married Katherina von Rüdiger. Katherina was a widow, having previously been married to Henrich Pechau, a town councillor of Thorn, by whom she had a son, Johann Peckau, who would be like another uncle to the young Nicolaus Copernicus.

Lucas Watzenrode the Elder died in 1462, leaving three children: Barbara, the astronomer’s mother; Christina, who in 1459 married Tiedeman Van Allen, a prosperous merchant serving in the last quarter of the fifteenth century eight one-year terms as Mayor of Thorn; and Lucas Watzenrode the Younger, who would become Bishop of Warmia (Ermeland), the region between Pomerania and Masuria in northeastern Poland, one of the four provinces into which the Duchy of Prussia was then divided, with the Estates of Royal Prussia to its west and the Kingdom of Poland to its south. The Watzenrodes were further related by marriage to wealthy burgher families of Krakow, Danzig and Thorn, as well as prominent noble families of Royal Prussia.

Thorn was founded on the site of an old Polish settlement by the Teutonic Knights, who built a castle there in 1230. Three years later the Grand Master of the Teutonic Knights, Hermann von Salza, together with his associate Hermann Balk, signed the foundation charters for Thorn and the nearby city of Kulm (Chelmno). These were among the seventy places or more in Prussia founded by the Teutonic Knights, each being protected by a castle and often endowed with a church. The sense of security given by these castellated settlements attracted the surrounding farmers, and soon developed into towns and cities with craftsmen and traders, each of the communities surrounded by defence walls and interconnected by roads.

The Teutonic Knights were one of three orders – the others being the Knights Templars and the Knights Hospitallers of St John – founded during The Crusades, their purpose being to aid Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land by building hospices and hospitals for them as well as fighting alongside the crusaders. Their emblem, a black cross on a white field, contrasted with the red cross on white of the Knights Templars and the white cross on red of the Knights Hospitallers.

The Order of the Teutonic Knights was founded at the end of the twelfth century at Acre in the Gulf of Haifa, which had been captured by the army of the Third Crusade in 1191 after a memorable siege. Following the defeat of the Christian forces in the Levant, the Order moved to Transylvania in 1211 to help defend Hungary against an invasion by a Turkic tribe known as the Cumans. Then in 1226 Duke Conrad I of Mazovia invited Hermann von Salza to move his knights into the Baltic region to conquer and Christianize the pagans known as the Old Prussians. Pope Honorius III had already called for a crusade against the Prussians, but this had been unsuccessful and Duke Conrad was thus led to bring in the Teutonic Knights, giving them a large grant of land in Culmerland, the region around Kulm, as well as any territory they might conquer, putting them only under the authority of the Holy See.

The Teutonic Knights slaughtered and enslaved the Prussians and seized their lands, and by the mid-fourteenth century they had taken control of most of the northern tier of what is now Poland. The Kingdom of Poland, much reduced in size because of the incursions of the Teutonic Knights and other powers, began to revive under Casimir III, the Great (r. 1333–70), the last king of the Piast dynasty, which had ruled since the end of the tenth century.

When Casimir began his reign, the Polish economy was ruined and the country depopulated and devastated by continual war. When he died he left a prosperous kingdom that had doubled in size, mostly through the addition of territory in what is today the Ukraine. He had reformed the institutions of the kingdom, sanctioned a code of laws, built many new castles, and, with the permission of Pope Urban V, founded a Studium Generale in Krakow, the first institution of higher learning in Poland. As part of his effort to repopulate the kingdom he encouraged Jews to resettle in Poland in large numbers, protecting them as ‘people of the king.’ As a result some 70 per cent of Ashkenazi Jews trace their origin to Poland in the time of Casimir the Great.

Casimir had no legal sons, and so he arranged for his sister Elisabeth, Dowager Queen of Hungary, and her son Louis, King of Hungary, to be his successors to the Polish throne. After his death 1370, Louis was proclaimed King of Poland, though his mother Elisabeth was the power behind the throne until her death in 1380. When Louis died in 1382, he was succeeded by his eldest surviving daughter, Mary, who became Queen of Hungary. But the Polish nobility were opposed to a personal union with Hungary, and they chose Mary’s younger sister, Hedwig, who on 15 October 1384 was crowned in Krakow as King Jadwiga of Poland, not long after her tenth birthday. (Her official title was ‘king’ rather than ‘queen’, signifying that she was a sovereign in her own right and not just a royal consort.)

Two years later Jadwiga was betrothed to Jogaila, Grand Duke of Lithuania, an illiterate heathen who was about 24 at the time. Jogaila had agreed to adopt Christianity and promised to return to Poland lands that had been ‘stolen’ by its neighbours. Jadwiga had misgivings about the marriage, for she had heard that Jogaila was a filthy bear-like barbarian, cruel and uncivilized, and so she sent one of her knights, Zawisza the Red, to see if her proposed husband was really human. Zawisza reported that Jogaila was beardless, clean and civilized, and though an unlettered heathen he seemed to have a high regard for Christian culture. Therefore, Jadwiga went ahead with the marriage, which was held in Krakow Cathedral on 4 March 1386, two weeks after Jogaila was baptized. Immediately after the wedding Archbishop Bodzanta crowned Jogaila, who became King of Poland as Wladyslaw II Jagiello, beginning a reign that would last for 48 years. Thus started the illustrious Jagiellonian dynasty, which reigned until 1572; its dynasts ruling as Kings of Poland and Grand Dukes of Lithuania.

Wladyslaw and Jadwiga reigned as co-rulers, and though Jadwiga had little real power she was very active in the political and cultural life of Poland. She led two expeditions into Ruthenia in 1387, when she was only thirteen, and recovered territory that had been transferred to Hungary during her father’s reign. Three years later she personally opened negotiations with the Teutonic Knights. Jadwiga gave birth to a daughter on 22 June 1399, but within a month both mother and child died.

Jadwiga was renowned for her charitable works and religious foundations, which led to her canonization as a saint in 1997 by the Polish Pope John Paul II. One of the legacies in her last will and testament provided for the restoration of Krakow’s Studium Generale, otherwise known as Krakow Academy, a bequest that was faithfully carried out by King Wladyslaw, creating the institution known today as the Jagiellonian University of Krakow.

A Polish–Lithuanian army broke the power of the Teutonic Knights at the Battle of Tannenberg in 1410. This war ended with the First Peace of Thorn, signed in February 1411. According to the terms of this treaty, the Teutonic Knights held on to most of their territory through the control of their fortified cities and towns, though their subjects grew increasingly rebellious under the harsh rule of the Order.

During the next quarter of a century the Polish Crown fought the Teutonic Knights in a series of three wars that devastated Prussia, though with no territorial loss for the Order. In 1440 the gentry of Thorn joined with other towns to form the Prussian Confederation, which in 1454 rose up in revolt against the Teutonic Knights, beginning the Thirteen Years’ War, in which they were aided by Casimir IV Jagiellon, King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania. At the beginning of the revolt the people of Thorn stormed and captured the castle of the Knights and killed or imprisoned its defenders. The rebellion finally ended on 19 October 1466 with the Second Peace of Thorn. According to the terms of the treaty, the western part of the Order’s territory along the lower Vistula came under Polish suzerainty as the Estates of Royal Prussia, which included Thorn and Danzig, while the wealthy see of Warmia became a separate dominion ruled by its bishop under the Polish Crown.

The Teutonic Knights retained only the hinterland of the port of Königsberg bounded on the southwest by Warmia. The Peace of Thorn was reaffirmed on 8 April 1525 by the Treaty of Krakow, which gave the Grand Master of the Teutonic Knights hereditary possession of the Order’s territory, then known as ‘Ducal Prussia’, as a fief of the Polish Crown.

Such was the political chequerboard of the ‘remote corner of the earth’ where Copernicus was born and spent most of his life. His father had moved to Thorn during the Thirteen Years’ War against the Teutonic Knights, and he lent money to the city to help support the soldiers of the Crown who were defending it as well as paying for a bridge across the Vistula, later serving as magistrate and alderman. Copernicus’ maternal grandfather, Lucas Watzenrode the Elder, had fought against the Teutonic Knights in the Thirteen Years’ War, in which he was wounded. He is listed in the Thorner Bürger Buch, the registry of the citizens of Thorn, as a landowner, businessman, judge and councilman, the type of burgher who had formed the core of the resistance to the Order of the Teutonic Knights.

Thorn was a member of the Hanseatic League, an alliance of trading cities and their guilds that held a trade monopoly along the northern tier of Europe from the Baltic to the North Sea. The commercial activities that led to the formation of this alliance originated in 1159 in the northern German port city of Lübeck, ‘Queen of the Baltic’, after it was rebuilt by Duke Henry the Lion of Saxony. Lübeck became a base for merchants in Saxony and Westphalia to trade farther afield along the coast from the North Sea and the Baltic and up rivers into the hinterland to cities like Thorn and Krakow, forming guilds known as Hansa, which bound the member cities to come to one another’s aid with ships and armed men. The formal founding of the League came in 1356 at Lübeck, when representatives of the member cities met in the town hall and ratified the charter of the first Hansetag, or Hanseatic Diet.

Lübeck and other cities of the League built trading posts called kontor, founding them as far afield as the inland Russian port of Novgorod, Bergen in Norway, and London. The London kontor, established in 1320, was west of London Bridge near Upper Thames Street on the present site of Cannon Street station. Like Hanseatic kontors elsewhere, the trading post in London developed into a walled community with its own warehouses, weigh house, offices, houses and church. Beside the kontors, each of the Hanseatic ports had a warehouse run by a representative of the League, those in England located in Bristol, Boston, Bishop’s Lynn (now King’s Lynn), Hull, Ipswich, Norwich, Yarmouth (now Great Yarmouth) and York. Krakow, Thorn and Danzig had Hansa representatives, the latter becoming the largest city in the League due to its control of Polish grain exports. By the beginning of the sixteenth century, Danzig had a population of more than 35,000, while Krakow, the capital of the Polish Kingdom, had about 20,000 inhabitants and Thorn some 10,000.

A fifteenth-century chronicler describes Thorn in the time of Copernicus: ‘Thorn with its beautiful buildings and its roofs of gleaming tile is so magnificent that almost no town can match it for beauty of location and splendor of location.’ The population of the city is now 20 times greater than it was in the fifteenth century, but the old walled town on the right bank of the Vistula is almost miraculously preserved, with its many Gothic buildings, all in brick, laid out along the medieval network of narrow streets and around the cobbled main square, still dominated by the Old Town Hall built in 1274 and extended in the late sixteenth century. When viewed from the Vistula the old town is still much the same as it appears in a lithograph done in 1684 by Christoph Hartknoch, lacking only the sailing barges that Copernicus would have seen in his youth, making their way along the river to and from the docks below the city walls.

Nicolaus Copernicus was the youngest of four children, the others being his brother Andreas and his sisters Barbara and Katherina. When he was seven years old, the family moved from Saint Anne’s Street to a larger house on the main square of Thorn, where the city’s weekly market was held. By that time he had started in the parochial school at the nearby Church of St Johann, whose renown attracted students from all over Poland. There his studies included mathematics and Latin, which was not only the universal academic language of Europe but was used in the liturgy at the Church of St Johann and spoken by the merchants of the Hanseatic League who traded in Thorn.

King Casimir IV visited Thorn in 1485, accompanied by his court, disembarking from the royal barge beside the main gate of the city, the entire populace there to greet him. Casimir spent six weeks in Thorn, dining in turn at the houses of the various notables, and so the young Nicolaus Copernicus would have met the king several times, for his extended family included the most influential people in the city.

Niklas Koppernigk died some time between 18 July 1483 and 19 August 1485, the former date marked in the last record of his financial affairs, and the latter by a reference to him as deceased. He was buried in the Church of St Johann, where his portrait can still be seen on his funerary monument; a tall, slim figure with a moustache and long black hair, shown on his knees with his hands joined in prayer. His son Nicolaus would have been among the mourners at the funeral, left without a father before he had even entered his teens.

Barbara Koppernigk never remarried, and she continued to live in the house on the market square with her children until she died, passing away some time between 1495 and 1507. Her oldest daughter, Barbara, left the house to become a nun at the Benedictine convent in Kulm. The youngest girl, Katherina, married a merchant from Krakow, Bartholomaeus Gertner, who had moved to Thorn and become a city councillor. The Gertners moved into the Koppernigk house, where their five children were born and they continued to live until at least 1507.

Nicolaus and his older brother Andreas were taken in hand after their father’s death by their uncle Lucas Watzenrode, who looked after their education. Lucas had studied at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow in the years 1463–4, after which he went on to the University of Cologne, where he received an MA in 1468. He then completed his education at the University of Bologna, where in 1473 he was awarded a doctorate in canon law.

After receiving his doctorate Lucas returned to Thorn, where he found employment as a school teacher. At the school he became involved with the principal’s daughter, described by a contemporary chronicler as a ‘pious virgin’. The result of this affair was an illegitimate son named Philipp Teschner, who later became Mayor of Braunsberg (Braniewo), a town in east Prussia, where he was a prominent supporter of the Protestant Reformation.

Lucas left the school before his bastard was born, giving up teaching and embarking on a career in the Church. The following year he was appointed Canon of Leczyca, a town southeast of Thorn. During the years 1477–88 he worked as a close collaborator with Sbigneus Olesnicki the Younger, nephew of Cardinal Sbigneus Olesnicki the Elder, the most powerful man in Poland after King Casimir IV. Lucas took up residence with Sbigneus the Younger at Gnesen, 60 miles southwest of Thorn. While he was there, he used his influential connections to secure new prebends, or stipends: first the canonry of Wladyslaw in 1478, then Warmia in 1479 and Gnesen in 1485. He was finally ordained as a priest in 1487.

The Second Peace of Thorn in 1466 had removed Warmia from the control of the Teutonic Knights and placed it under the sovereignty of the Polish Crown as part of the province of Royal Prussia, although with special privileges that gave it some degree of autonomy under its bishop. The following year the cathedral chapter of Warmia elected Nicolaus von Tüngen as bishop, going against the wishes of King Casimir IV. The new bishop allied himself with the Teutonic Knights and King Matthias Corvinus of Hungary. This led to a conflict known as the War of the Priests, which began in 1478 when the army of the Polish Crown invaded Warmia, putting the town of Braunsberg under siege. The town withstood the siege, and the war ended the following year with the Treaty of Piotrkow Trybunalski. According to the terms of the treaty, King Casimir recognized von Tüngen as bishop and accepted the right of the cathedral chapter of Warmia to elect future bishops, provided that they were accepted by the Polish king and swore loyalty to him.

On 31 January 1489 von Tüngen resigned because of ill health, and soon afterwards the cathedral chapter elected Lucas Watzenrode as Bishop of Warmia. The new bishop was mit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the Author
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction
• 1 ‘This Remote Corner of the Earth’
• 2 A New Age
• 3 The Jagiellonian University of Krakow
• 4 Renaissance Italy
• 5 The Bishopric of Warmia
• 6 The Little Commentary
• 7 The Letter Against Werner
• 8 The Frauenburg Wenches
• 9 The First Disciple
• 10 The First Account
• 11 Preparing the Revolutions
• 12 The Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres
• 13 The Copernican Revolution
• 14 Debating the Copernican and Ptolemaic Models
• 15 The Newtonian Synthesis
• Epilogue Searching for Copernicus
• Source Notes
• Bibliography