Person1473 – 1543

Nicolaus Copernicus

Also called: Mikołaj Kopernik, Copernicus

Polish astronomer and churchman whose On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres argued that the Earth moves around the Sun

Born the son of a merchant in Toruń, a trading town on the Vistula, he lost his father early and, with the help of his uncle, a bishop, studied at Kraków before learning canon law and medicine at Bologna and Padua in Italy. All his life he served as a canon of Frombork Cathedral, managing church estates, practising as a physician and even writing a proposal for currency reform. He circulated a summary of his heliocentric theory only among friends until the young mathematician Rheticus persuaded him at last to publish the full work.

Show on the map

Where they went

Open the full map

OpenFreeMap © OpenMapTiles © OpenStreetMap contributors

1 related event

1
1543Copernicus and the Heliocentric Theoryauthor
In 1543 Copernicus published On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, placing the Sun at the centre of the universe, and in the same year Vesalius founded modern anatomy with On the Fabric of the Human Body. It was the beginning of the Scientific Revolution.

People who appear alongside

Andreas Vesalius1514 – 1564
Flemish anatomist who dissected bodies himself at Padua and wrote On the Fabric of the Human Body, founding modern anatomy

Themes this person appears in

Scientific Revolution, Enlightenment and the English Revolutions1543 – 1796
The Scientific Revolution from Copernicus to Newton, parliamentary government in England won through the Puritan and Glorious Revolutions, and the Enlightenment that sought to remake society by reason — the groundwork of the civic revolutions and the Industrial Revolution