Born in Toruń in 1473, Copernicus wasn't first to move Earth

Nicolaus Copernicus was born on 19 February 1473 in Toruń, a Hanseatic port on the Vistula River, and died on 24 May 1543, the year his Sun-centred cosmology finally appeared in print.

Was he Polish or German? Both claims have roots. His father was a merchant who had moved to Toruń from Kraków and his mother came from the town’s leading Watzenrode family. The household was German, but Toruń had been ceded to the Kingdom of Poland in 1466, so he was born a subject of the Polish crown.

Not the first to move the Earth

Copernicus did not invent the idea of a moving Earth. Archimedes records that the Greek astronomer Aristarchus of Samos proposed that Earth spins daily and circles the Sun. What Copernicus added was a full mathematical system. He circulated a short manuscript sketch, the Commentariolus, by 1514, then spent decades on De revolutionibus.

When the book was printed in Nuremberg in 1543, the Lutheran minister Andreas Osiander, who saw the printing through, added an anonymous preface calling the system a calculating device whose hypotheses “need not be true nor even probable”, which contradicted the book itself. Copernicus’s pupil Rheticus and his friend Tiedemann Giese protested. Copernicus is said to have held a finished copy on his deathbed.

Even his grave became a puzzle. Remains excavated at Frombork Cathedral, where he had served as a canon, were matched in a 2009 DNA study to hairs found in a book he had owned, carried off to Uppsala, Sweden, as war booty in 1626, and they were reburied in 2010. Some scientists still doubt the match: the maternal DNA used is shared with his uncle, Bishop Lucas Watzenrode, who was buried in the same cathedral.