page_title: Nicolaus Copernicus
section_title: Nationality
hierarchical_section_title: Nicolaus Copernicus / Nationality
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: Denkmal für Kopernikus an der Alten Universität Krakau. English: Nicolaus Copernicus Monument in Kraków, by Professor Cyprian Godebski. Esperanto: Monumento pri Koperniko ĉe la Malnova Universitato de Krakovo. Polski: Pomnik Mikołaja Kopernika w Krakowie.
context_page_description: Nicolaus Copernicus was a Renaissance-era mathematician and astronomer, who formulated a model of the universe that placed the Sun rather than Earth at the center of the universe, in all likelihood independently of Aristarchus of Samos, who had formulated such a model some eighteen centuries earlier.
  The publication of Copernicus' model in his book De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, 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.
  Copernicus was born and died in Royal Prussia, a region that had been part of the Kingdom of Poland since 1466. A polyglot and polymath, he obtained a doctorate in canon law and was also a mathematician, astronomer, physician, classics scholar, translator, governor, diplomat, and economist. 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.
context_section_description: There has been discussion of Copernicus' nationality and of whether it is meaningful to ascribe to him a nationality in the modern sense.
  Nicolaus Copernicus was born and raised in Royal Prussia, a semiautonomous and polyglot region of the Kingdom of Poland. He was the child of German-speaking parents and grew up with German as his mother tongue. His first alma mater was the University of Kraków in Poland. When he later studied in Italy, at the University of Bologna, he joined the German Nation, a student organization for German-speakers of all allegiances (Germany would not become a nation-state until 1871). His family stood against the Teutonic Order and actively supported the city of Toruń during the Thirteen Years' War (1454–66). Copernicus' father lent money to Poland's King Casimir IV Jagiellon to finance the war against the Teutonic Knights, but the inhabitants of Royal Prussia also resisted the Polish crown's efforts for greater control over the region.
  Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopedia Americana, The Concise Columbia Encyclopedia, The Oxford World Encyclopedia, and World Book Encyclopedia refer to Copernicus as a "Polish astronomer". Sheila Rabin, writing in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, describes Copernicus as a "child of a German family [who] was a subject of the Polish crown", while Manfred Weissenbacher writes that Copernicus's father was a Germanized Pole.
  No Polish texts by Copernicus survive due to the rarity of Polish literary language before the writings of the Polish Renaissance poets Mikołaj Rej and Jan Kochanowski (educated Poles had generally written in Latin); but it is known that Copernicus knew Polish on a par with German and Latin.
  Historian Michael Burleigh describes the nationality debate as a "totally insignificant battle" between German and Polish scholars during the interwar period. Polish astronomer Konrad Rudnicki calls the discussion a "fierce scholarly quarrel in ... times of nationalism" and describes Copernicus as an inhabitant of a German-speaking territory that belonged to Poland, himself being of mixed Polish-German extraction.
  Czesław Miłosz describes the debate as an "absurd" projection of a modern understanding of nationality onto Renaissance people, who identified with their home territories rather than with a nation. Similarly, historian Norman Davies writes that Copernicus, as was common in his era, was "largely indifferent" to nationality, being a local patriot who considered himself "Prussian". Miłosz and Davies both write that Copernicus had a German-language cultural background, while his working language was Latin in accord with the usage of the time. Additionally, according to Davies, "there is ample evidence that he knew the Polish language". Davies concludes that, "Taking everything into consideration, there is good reason to regard him both as a German and as a Pole: and yet, in the sense that modern nationalists understand it, he was neither."
caption: Nicolaus Copernicus Monument in Kraków
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