Nicolaus Copernicus

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Nicolaus Copernicus : biography

19 February 1473 – 24 May 1543

Education

In Poland

Upon the father’s death, young Nicolaus’ maternal uncle, Lucas Watzenrode the Younger (1447–1512), took the boy under his wing and saw to his education and career. Watzenrode maintained contacts with leading intellectual figures in Poland and was a friend of the influential Italian-born humanist and Kraków courtier, Filippo Buonaccorsi. There are no surviving primary documents on the early years of Copernicus’ childhood and education. Copernicus biographers assume that Watzenrode first sent young Copernicus to St. John’s School, at Toruń, where he himself had been a master. Later, according to Armitage, the boy attended the Cathedral School at Włocławek, up the Vistula River from Toruń, which prepared pupils for entrance to the University of Kraków, Watzenrode’s alma mater in Poland’s capital.

In the winter semester of 1491–92 Copernicus, as "Nicolaus Nicolai de Thuronia", matriculated together with his brother Andrew at the University of Kraków (now Jagiellonian University). 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. 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.

Copernicus’ Kraków studies gave him a thorough grounding in the mathematical-astronomical knowledge taught at the university (arithmetic, geometry, geometric optics, cosmography, theoretical and computational astronomy), a good knowledge of the philosophical and natural-science writings of Aristotle (De coelo, Metaphysics), stimulated his interest in learning, and made him conversant with humanistic culture. Copernicus broadened the knowledge that he took from the university lecture halls with independent reading of books that he acquired during his Kraków years (Euclid, Haly Abenragel, the Alfonsine Tables, Johannes Regiomontanus’ Tabulae directionum); to this period, probably, also date his earliest scientific notes, now preserved partly at Uppsala University. At Kraków Copernicus began collecting a large library on astronomy; it would later be carried off as war booty by the Swedes during the Deluge in 1650s and is now at the Uppsala University Library.

Copernicus’ four years at Kraków played an important role in the development of his critical faculties and initiated his analysis of the logical contradictions in the two most popular systems of astronomy—Aristotle’s theory of homocentric spheres, and Ptolemy’s mechanism of eccentrics and epicycles—the surmounting and discarding of which constituted the first step toward the creation of Copernicus’ own doctrine of the structure of the universe.

Without taking a degree, probably in the fall of 1495, Copernicus left Kraków for the court of his uncle Watzenrode, who in 1489 had been elevated to Prince-Bishop of Warmia and soon (before November 1495) sought to place his nephew in the Warmia canonry vacated by the 26 August 1495 death of its previous tenant, Jan Czanow. For unclear reasons—probably due to opposition from part of the chapter, who appealed to Rome—Copernicus’ installation was delayed, inclining Watzenrode to send both his nephews to study canon law in Italy, seemingly with a view to furthering their ecclesiastic careers and thereby also strengthening his own influence in the Warmia chapter.

Leaving Warmia in mid-1496—possibly with the retinue of the chapter’s chancellor, Jerzy Pranghe, who was going to Italy—in the fall (October?) of that year Copernicus arrived in Bologna and a few months later (after 6 January 1497) signed himself into the register of the Bologna University of Jurists’ "German nation", which also included young Poles from Silesia, Prussia and Pomerania, as well as students of other nationalities.