The Theory of Heliocentrism

Europe is and has always been more of a whirlpool of cultures and languages than the neat patchwork of separate countries that one can see on a map. This reality can make something so simple as stating the nationality of some European historical figures far more complicated than it seems like it ought to be. The man who revived the heliocentric theory of Aristarchus after it had been ignored for more than a millennium and a half is a fine example. He was born on February 19, 1473, in the town of Torun, which then as now lay in north-central Poland. Yet the region to which it belongs is sometimes known as Old Prussia, and has throughout history been a melting pot of Polish and German influences. Torun —Thorn in its German appellation — was actually founded 240 years before the birth in question by the Teutonic Knights, a German-speaking order of chivalry that arose out of the Crusades, much like the more famous Knights Templar. Torun’s citizens didn’t formally become subjects of the Polish king until 1454. Cultures, however, cannot be transformed as quickly as territory can change hands on a map. Nineteen years later, Torun remained more German than Polish.

Thus the baby in whom were are interested was baptized as Niklas Koppernigk, and grew up speaking German to his family. On the rolls of the Polish government, he was known as Mikolai Kopernik. But he would become known to the world via the scholarly nom de plume he would adopt, a Latinized version of his birth name: Nicolaus Copernicus.

Little Niklas was the fourth child and second son of a family of four. Torun was a prominent commercial town at the time of his birth, although somewhat in decline of late, and his father was a fairly prosperous merchant who traded extensively in copper and wine. In keeping with Medieval tradition, the stations his two sons were to occupy in life were decided as soon as they were born. As the oldest boy, Andreas Koppernigk would take over the family enterprise, while Niklas would suffer or enjoy the traditional fate of second sons, that of being donated to the Church. In this case at least, the stars seemed to have aligned appropriately: Andreas was a bold, lusty boy, while Niklas was quiet, thoughtful, and studious.

The death of his father when Niklas was ten years old didn’t materially alter his destiny; if anything, it ensured it. For, along with his mother and siblings, he became a ward of his uncle Lukasz Watzenrode, a fast-rising priest who would be appointed bishop of the diocese of Warmia, which was close to but did not include Torun, within the next few years. Watzenrode took a serious interest in his shy, quiet nephew. When Niklas turned eighteen, he arranged for him to attend Jagiellonian University in Kraków, the oldest and most prestigious institute of its kind in the kingdom. The education Niklas received there was based almost entirely on ancient Latin and Greek texts, among them those of Claudius Ptolemy. It was there that he began to sign his scholarly correspondence, all of which he wrote in Latin, with the name of Nicolaus Copernicus.

When Copernicus was 23, his uncle sent him to Italy, to study canon law at the University of Bologna, the oldest in all of Europe. He spent four years there, followed by a year in Rome, reading and lecturing. Then he went to the University of Padua for two years, studying medicine this time (a curriculum built up, inevitably, from the ancient master Galen, who may have lived and worked for a period of time alongside Ptolemy in Alexandria).

At the beginning of 1503, Nicolaus Copernicus was about to turn 30 years old, and had virtually nothing in the way of tangible accomplishments to show for his twelve years at various universities; he hadn’t managed to secure an actual degree from any of them. Nor had he been ordained as a priest, as his father had once expected. He comes across as one of those perpetual students whom you can meet hanging around any modern humanities department, a man who wanted to know stuff just to know stuff, who used his studies as a refuge from a real world that tended to be too messy for his sensibilities. His uncle had, for whatever reason, indulged him in this thus far. But it appears that his patience may have been wearing thin. In May of 1503, at any rate, Copernicus traveled to Ferrara to sit for an exam to become a certified canon lawyer. Having passed it, he returned to Poland at last, to take up a position in the Baltic cathedral town of Frombork — or Frauenburg, as he would have felt more comfortable calling it — at his uncle’s side. His official titles were court physician and secretary.

Even now, though, Copernicus seemed perennially distracted by the abstractions of the mind, more at ease in his books than he was in the world around him. In 1509, in a rare burst of productive energy, he published the first book with his own name on it. It was anything but a major work, being a set of translations from Greek into Latin of some verses by an obscure seventh-century Byzantine writer named Theophylact Simocatta. He was careful to clean up some racy passages therein. “Just as physicians usually modify the bitterness of drugs by sweetening them to make them more palatable to patients,” he wrote, “so these love letters have in like manner been rectified.”

But Copernicus was also pondering far weightier matters than lovelorn ancients. He had been bothered by Claudius Ptolemy’s model of the cosmos from the moment he had first encountered it as a teenager. Like Pythagoras, Plato, and Aristotle, he saw the universe through the eyes of an aesthete. He wanted to believe that the sky above was full of “beautiful and worthy objects, most deserving to be known.” Yet Ptolemy’s mishmash of circles inside circles inside circles was most definitely not that. Whereas the aesthetic impulse had led so many others away from the truth, it led Copernicus toward it.

About 1510, he began to pass a slim, hand-written manuscript around among his acquaintances. Called simply the Brief Sketch, it hid beneath that modest title a radical overhaul of everything that human beings thought they knew about the universe. “All spheres surround the Sun as though it were in the middle of them, and therefore the center of the universe is near the Sun,” Copernicus wrote. “What appears to us as motions of the Sun arise not from its motion but from the motion of the Earth and our sphere, with which we revolve about the Sun like any other planet.” In other words, the Earth was both spinning around on its own axis and orbiting the Sun.

None of this was based to any great extent on astronomical observations undertaken by Copernicus personally. He was a theorist by disposition, not a practical doer, and he went outside to look up at the sky himself seldom and begrudgingly. This was just as well in a way, given that Frombork was and is a pretty terrible place to try to do observational astronomy, with skies obscured the vast majority of the time by clouds blowing in off the gray and chilly Baltic Sea. Copernicus came up with his new vision of the cosmos almost entirely through reading what Ptolemy had written, sensing in his bones that a system this ugly and convoluted couldn’t possibly be right, and setting out to determine what other models might also fit the patterns in the heavens described by his ancient forefather. Sometimes Occam’s Razor is the most valuable utensil in a scientist’s toolbox.

Copernicus appears not to have felt any trepidation about discussing his radical theory; indeed, he seems hardly aware in his Brief Sketch of just how radical it really is. Part of the reason for this is doubtless the fundamental, guileless naïveté of the man, but it perhaps has something to do with the tenor of the times as well. Julius II and Leo X, the popes of this period, were liberal men when it came to the life of the mind. Less ideally, they were also dyed-in-the-wool libertines, both publicly corrupt and personally hypocritical about their vows of abstinence and chastity, symptoms of a contagion that had spread through the Church from top to bottom, and would soon ignite a crisis the likes of which it had never faced before. For now, though, the latitude allowed to thinkers like Copernicus was considerable, outside of a handful of places in Europe where the local authorities enforced a stricter adherence to orthodoxy. (The notorious Spanish Inquisition, for example, was already in full flight.)

In the Brief Sketch, Copernicus presented his theory of heliocentrism as merely a preliminary proposal. He would work it all out mathematically, he said, in a forthcoming book, consciously modeled on Ptolemy’s Almagest; despite his rejection of Ptolemy’s geocentric universe, Copernicus retained a huge admiration for the ancient master. Unfortunately, the death of his uncle in 1512 meant an end to cushy patronage. Copernicus maintained his position in the Church hierarchy, but he had to devote more time to his official functions, which further slowed the never overly rapid pace of his scholarship.In November of 1516, he was sent to the town of Olsztyn to serve on behalf of the Church as an “administrator.” This meant he was involved in every aspect of the lives of the peasants who lived thereabout: adjudicating property and marital disputes, interpreting wills, even coordinating the sowings and reapings in the fields. Then, in January of 1520, the entire region was engulfed in war, when the Knights of the Teutonic Order, who were still active, launched a bid to recover their lost territory from the Polish crown. It was the most worldly period of Copernicus’s life, whether he wished it to be or not. Astronomy fell by the wayside.

The Knights agreed to a truce that restored the territorial status quo in April of 1521, and Copernicus returned at last to Frombork. Now 48 years old, he was mostly allowed to pursue his long-neglected studies in peace once more. When not engaged in his light official duties as a doctor to the new bishop of Warmia and his court — a role in which he was by all indications skilled and highly valued — he spent his days cloistered with his books, working on his Almagest for a new age.

Meanwhile the world outside his ivory tower was becoming ever more chaotic. In eastern Germany, not that far at all from the border of Poland, the former friar Martin Luther was leading a full-on rebellion against the authority of the pope in Rome, daring to describe him as the antichrist rather than Jesus Christ’s chosen representative on Earth. These new, so-called “Protestants” who followed Luther’s teachings were to be found even within the diocese of Warmia, where they met and worshiped in secret, in disused cellars and seldom-visited forest clearings.

One of their guiding ethics was the belief that the Bible ought to be available to everyone, not just the priesthood who could read Latin — that it ought to be translated into the everyday vernaculars of Europe and printed in cheap editions, so that everyone who was literate could have his own copy, preferably to read aloud to those who were not. Luther used the Bible as a cudgel against the Catholic Church, pointing out all the ways that that institution deviated from the word of God. This in turn created a tension within the Church, between the free thinkers who saw the Bible as a touchstone to be taken seriously but not always literally, and the conservatives who, whether out of honest personal belief or as a means of protection against the assays of Martin Luther and company, wished to promote it as the absolutely inviolate, absolutely literal Truth of God. The conservatives were gaining more influence as it became clear that Western Christendom had gone to war with itself, and the Catholic side of the divide couldn’t afford to lose any more ground to the Protestant upstarts. And this in turn began to make Nicolaus Copernicus a magnate for controversy both inside and outside of Catholic circles, a role he did not relish at all.

The Brief Report, or at least even briefer reports of what it proposed, was well known inside the Protestant camp, who tended to perceive it as yet one more sign of the godless corruption of the existing Church. It reached Martin Luther; predictably enough, he assailed it with scripture. Did not Psalm 93 state that “the world is established, that it cannot be moved”? And had not Joshua asked his lord to cause the Sun to stand still to commemorate the Israeli victory over the Amorites, and been obliged by God? (“So the Sun stood still in the midst of heaven, and hasted not to go down about a whole day.”) “People give ear to an upstart astrologer who strove to show that the Earth revolves,” barked Martin Luther, “not the heavens or the firmament, the Sun and the Moon. This fool wishes to reverse the entire scheme of astronomy, but sacred scripture tells that Joshua commanded the Sun to stand still, not the Earth.” To be called out for ridicule in this way was not at all pleasant for Copernicus, who had no wish to become a public figure of any sort.

Nevertheless, at some point between 1530 and 1535, he finally finished his book on his theory of heliocentrism, which he called De revolutionibus, or On the Revolutions. It was by far the most substantial original work on the subject of astronomy to have been written in the West since the Almagest of 1400 years earlier.

But now, having created his masterstroke, Copernicus was inclined to do nothing with it. He put the manuscript in a desk drawer and puttered about with other things. His life of the mind was always a markedly insular one; it may have been that he genuinely felt no need to share his findings with the world, that it was enough for him simply to know, to have worked it out for himself. Then, too, this quiet, reclusive scholar may have felt that he had had enough of being at the center of controversy after enduring the Protestant reception of his Brief Report. (There is another possibly as well: that Copernicus may have concluded at the end of his studies that the results weren’t worth publication, because his fully worked-out mathematical model of the cosmos had ended up being every bit as convoluted and ugly as Ptolemy’s — but I will save that discussion for the next chapter.)

Regardless of his reasons for hiding the manuscript away, Copernicus had talked and written too much about his ideas already to expect public interest in them to disappear. By no means was all of the attention negative; the open-minded wing of the Catholic Church was still a force to be reckoned with, one which could still count the pope himself among its broad adherents. In November of 1536, Copernicus received a remarkable letter from Cardinal Nicholas Schönberg, a close advisor to the recently crowned Pope Paul III, as he had been to his two predecessors.

I have been informed that you have created a new theory of the universe, according to which the Earth moves and the Sun occupies the basic and hence central position. Without wishing to be inopportune, I beg you most emphatically to communicate your discovery to the learned world, and to send me as soon as possible your theories about the universe, together with whatever else you have pertaining to the subject. If you will do me these favors, you will find that you are dealing with a man who has your interests at heart, and wishes to do full justice to your excellence.

The controversial nature of the theory of heliocentrism isn’t hard to detect in the subtext of Schönberg’s letter, but it likewise seems clear that that powerful man is using the letter to pledge his support, to tell Copernicus that he — and presumably others in and around the papal court — will have his back if he publishes his book. Yet, rightly or wrongly, Copernicus did not take the good cardinal at his word. He appears not to have even answered the letter.

The theory of heliocentrism wasn’t the only reason for Copernicus to feel himself besieged. Although he had never taken a priestly vow of celibacy, he had never married either, nor shown much interest in those of the opposite gender (or those of his own, for that matter). But beginning around 1531, it had become widely suspected in Frombork that he had entered into an “inappropriate” relationship with his housekeeper, a woman named Anna Schilling who was about twenty years his junior. In an earlier era, when countless prominent figures in the Church, among them plenty of popes, came complete with a train of “nieces” and “nephews” who were in actuality their illegitimate children, this sort of thing could have been politely overlooked. But Martin Luther’s hectoring was instilling a new pressure for men of the Church to match their behavior to their rhetoric, if they weren’t to look like exactly the wretched hypocrites he said they were. Copernicus was urged with increasing stridency to get rid of Anna. Normally the farthest thing from an obdurate man, in this case he refused to do so, insisting that the relationship was perfectly innocent. If that is the case, asked those around him, why not get rid of her anyway, just for appearance’s sake? Copernicus had no good answer to this question, which seemed like the most damning proof of his guilt of all.

Both the matter of the book and the suspected mistress came to a head in mid-1539, when Copernicus was 66 years old. At that time, he was visited by a much younger man who would go down in history as his Boswell. Their first meeting has been compared with those of Alexander and Aristotle, Cortés and Moctezuma II, Marx and Engels. It has been the subject of plays and novels; Arthur Koestler calls it “a kind of Homeric saga among scholars.”

Georg Joachim Rheticus was a dangerous visitor for Copernicus, for he was a full-blown Protestant; he arrived in Frombork direct from Wittenberg, the hometown of Martin Luther himself, whence that theologian wrote and published the incendiary tracts that were tearing Western Christianity in two. Born to a wealthy family in Feldkirch, an Austrian town in the Tyrol Mountains, Rheticus was the hare to Copernicus’s tortoise. By age 25, he had renounced the pope and become a professor at the University of Wittenberg, Martin Luther’s alma mater, studying and teaching mathematics and astronomy. Notwithstanding the scorn that Luther heaped upon the theory of heliocentrism, Rheticus was inclined to believe it as soon as he heard about it, so neatly was it said to resolve the ungodly ugliness of Ptolemy’s cosmos. The bare fact that this young man with such a bright future ahead of him was willing to risk it all by charging off into a Catholic realm and knocking at the door of a Catholic canon is a testament to just how taken he was with it.

It would have been fascinating to have been a fly on the wall to witness how Copernicus was convinced by nothing but Rheticus’s power of persuasion to allow his unexpected visitor into his good graces. As it is, we can only imagine that Rheticus might have said something like the words that Dava Sobel put into his mouth in her two-act play “And the Sun Stood Still.”

Our discussions will have nothing to do with faith. We’ll limit ourselves strictly to arithmetic and geometry. The wings of the human mind. On such wings as these, we can transcend our religious differences. Transcend all religious differences. Didn’t Abraham teach astronomy to the Hebrews? And Moses, another Jew? And heaven knows, all those Islamic astronomers, praying to their Allah five times a day, then watching the stars at night. Even going back to the Egyptians, the Greeks! Prometheus and the theft of divine fire! The very crime for which he suffered an eagle to devour his liver! What does that mean, if not that Prometheus delivered the light of astronomy to mortals?

Although we have no reason to doubt that Rheticus could be very persuasive, he failed to immediately persuade Copernicus to publish his On the Revolutions. Copernicus may have felt that he just couldn’t afford to court more trouble for himself. For at about the same time that Rheticus made his visit, he was finally ordered by his bishop in no uncertain terms to get rid of his housekeeper. And so he sent Anna Schilling away, on a day that may very well have been the most heartbreaking of his life.

Rheticus, however, stayed on in Copernicus’s house, where he lived in hiding, at constant risk of discovery and imprisonment — or worse — in a land that considered him a heretic. Copernicus, of course, was at scarcely less risk himself, especially in light of the recent scandal involving his housekeeper. In spite of it all, he agreed to allow Rheticus to write a sort of précis of On the Revolutions in his own words, then to do what he wished with it.

Rheticus duly wrote it up. Traveling under an assumed name, he then took the document to the Polish city of Gdansk, where the nearest printing presses were located, to turn it into a published book in February of 1540. The little 75-page volume marked the first description of the theory of heliocentrism, albeit a sketchy and cursory one, to appear in print. It explicitly called itself a mere summary of “the book of the revolutions of the most learned gentleman and most distinguished mathematician, the revered Doctor Nicolaus Copernicus of Torun, canon of Warmia.” It didn’t include the name of Georg Joachim Rheticus anywhere in its pages; its author was described only as “a certain youth, most zealous for mathematics.” Rheticus made his way back home to Wittenberg directly from Gdansk.

The little book had become a hot topic of discussion in the learned circles of both the Protestant and Catholic worlds by the summer of 1540, when Rheticus returned to Frombork for an even more extended stay. He arrived with two objectives: to learn Copernicus’s theory of heliocentrism in a grounded, rigidly mathematical way, and to convince his host to let his great work on the subject be published. After a non-trivial degree of struggle, he would succeed in both.

Rheticus is an elusive, contradictory figure. It is difficult to believe that he rose as quickly as he did in life without a gift for glad-handing and an ample supply of personal ambition. Yet he was scrupulously honest and fair, almost obsequiously so, in all of his dealings with Nicolaus Copernicus. Many another man in his position would have been tempted to steal the unassuming scholar’s meticulously worked-out system of the cosmos and pass it off as his own, but there is not a shred of evidence that the thought ever even occurred to Rheticus. On the less positive side, he was a less sober thinker than his cautious mentor. Copernicus never saw fit to even mention astrology in any of his surviving writings. This has led some historians of science to conclude that he had no truck with the idea that human destinies could be read in the sky, but it seems just as likely that he merely deemed the subject to be outside the scope of his own research into the physical movements of the heavenly bodies. Be that as it may, Rheticus definitely was a passionate, vocal devotee of astrology, so much so that he filled many of the scant 75 pages of his summary of the theory of heliocentrism with unwarranted extrapolations on that subject. Still, it cannot be denied that Georg Joachim Rheticus is the key reason that the full system of the cosmos of Nicolaus Copernicus was presented to the world, and thus that we still remember his mentor’s name today.

Copernicus was now an elderly man by the standards of his time, whose eyesight and energy were beginning to fail him. Rheticus took up the slack. Over the course of more than a year in Frombork, he wrestled the baggy manuscript into publishable form. He massaged and edited the text in consultation with Copernicus, even drew up new maps and tables and diagrams, then wrote out a clean copy, filling 424 pages with his neat, compact script. As his reward for all of this labor and much more that was still to come, Rheticus would receive not one single mention — not even the barest “thank you” — in the finished book.

In September of 1541, Copernicus and Rheticus said farewell to one another. With the former now plainly fading in health, the latter must have suspected that he would not be seeing this man whom he unhesitatingly called “great” again in this world. But he had gotten what he had come for: in his bag was the full manuscript of On the Revolutions, ready at long last for the printer.

Yet even a man as brash as Rheticus could be had to reckon with the implications of directly contradicting old Martin Luther, who was still holding court in Wittenberg, growing even less tolerant with age. He wrote to Andreas Osiander, a prominent Protestant intellectual based in Nuremberg whom he already knew to be sympathetic to his project, for advice on how to position the book to avoid its being hit with too much blowback. Osiander’s reply displays a deft political instinct. In suggesting that it be emphasized that Copernicus’s theory is merely a set of “hypotheses,” it chimes ironically with the way that Aristarchus apparently presented his own theory of heliocentrism — i.e., in a “book of hypotheses,” as it was described by Archimedes — 1800 years earlier.

The theologians will be readily placated if they hear that there can be different hypotheses for the same apparent motion; that the present hypotheses are brought forward, not because they are in reality true, but because they regulate the computation of the apparent and combined motion as conveniently as may be; that it is possible for someone else to devise different hypotheses; that one man may conceive a suitable system, and another a more suitable, while both systems produce the same phenomena of motion; that each and every man is at liberty to devise more convenient hypotheses; and that if he succeeds, he is to be congratulated. In this way, they will be diverted from stern defense and attracted by the charm of inquiry. First their antagonism will disappear, then they will seek the truth in vain by their own devices, and go over to the opinion of the author.

Even in his increasing infirmity, Copernicus was thinking along similar lines to Rheticus and Osiander, seeking to placate those who might be inclined to condemn him in the Catholic world. He prepared a lengthy and flowery, if also rather defensive, dedicatory “letter” to Pope Paul III for the first pages of the book, and sent it to Rheticus in Wittenberg: “Perhaps there will be babblers who claim to be judges of astronomy, although completely ignorant of the subject, and, badly distorting some passages of scripture to their purpose, will dare to find fault with my undertaking and censure it. In order that the educated and uneducated alike may see that I do not run away from judgment, I have preferred dedicating these results of my nocturnal study to Your Holiness rather than to anyone else. ”

Not until May of 1542 did Rheticus make his way to Nuremberg, home of the very best printers in Protestant Germany, to see the hand-written manuscript turned into a printed book. It is tempting to wonder whether the delay can be attributed to cold feet on the part of the brash young mathematician now that the pivotal moment was at hand, but it is just as probable that it was down to teaching obligations in Wittenberg. In a letter written while he was overseeing the printing in Nuremberg, he expressed no regret or anxiety. Quite the opposite, in fact: “I regret neither the expense, nor the long journey, nor any of the other hardships. Rather I feel I have reaped a great reward, namely that I, a rather daring youth, compelled this venerable man to share his ideas sooner in this discipline with the whole world.”

Rheticus chose a highly respected press, owned by one Johannes Petreius, to serve as the publisher. We should pause for a moment to appreciate how deeply odd this situation was: a Protestant press was about to publish a book by a Catholic intellectual which even included a florid dedication to Pope Paul III, otherwise known in Nuremberg circles as the latest incarnation of the Roman antichrist. The volume’s one saving grace was that it seemed likely to inflame Protestants and Catholics equally; at least it would give them one thing upon which they could agree.

Typesetting and printing a lengthy manuscript such as this one was a time-consuming process in those days; Rheticus spent months in Nuremberg fussing over the page proofs and waiting, waiting, waiting while the printers did their work. By October of 1542, less than half of the book had yet emerged from the printer. Nevertheless, Rheticus felt compelled to leave Nuremberg that month; he had been offered a prestigious professorship at Leipzig University which he wasn’t willing to let pass him by. He turned over supervision of the printing to Andreas Osiander. That august gentleman of learning being distracted by a myriad of other studies and obligations, he was often slow to return the page proofs, and so the printing process stretched out even longer.

More controversially, Osiander made his own last-minute changes and additions to the book without consulting either Copernicus or Rheticus. His main objective in doing so seems to have been to further armor it against the condemnations of closed minds like that of Martin Luther. He added to the title, making it into De revolutionibus orbium coelestium — On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres — to remove some of the focus from its depiction of a peripatetic Earth. And he added a preface of his own devising. This made the same point — that heliocentrism was only a set of “hypotheses” — which Osiander had already suggested to Rheticus, but hammered it home even more forcefully. The insistence that the theory of heliocentrism can lay no claim to objective truth comes across today as weirdly postmodern, even though it stems from an era that was not yet even fully modern.

Many scientists will doubtless be greatly shocked by the theories of this book. However, the master’s hypotheses are not necessarily true; they need not even be probable. It is completely sufficient if they lead to a computation that is in accordance with the astronomical observations. The astronomer will most readily follow those hypotheses which are most easily understood. The philosopher will perhaps demand greater probability, but neither of the two will be able to discover anything certain, unless it has been made known to him by divine revelation. Therefore let us grant that the following new hypotheses take their place beside the old ones which are not any more probable. Moreover, these are really admirable and easy to grasp, and in addition we shall find here a great treasure of the most learned observations. For the rest, let no one expect certainty from astronomy as regards hypotheses. It cannot give this certainty. He who takes everything that is worked out for other purposes as truth would leave this science probably more ignorant than when he came to it.

Osiander wasn’t willing to risk signing his own name to the preface, preferring to leave its authorship anonymous. This would lead to considerable confusion after the book was published, with many assuming Copernicus himself had written the preface, despite it referring to him in the third person as “the master”; as Arthur Koestler notes wryly, “the scholars of that age did not suffer from undue modesty.” It does seem clear enough that Osiander was simply trying to insulate the book as best he could from the storm he feared might be coming. But that wouldn’t prevent plenty of people, not least among them Georg Joachim Rheticus, from seeing his additions as an overweening overreach by a latecomer to the heliocentric project.

While the book was being printed, Nicolaus Copernicus’s health was rapidly failing him. Late in 1542, he suffered a stroke that paralyzed the right half of his body and left him unable to speak. It was an open question whether he would live to see the publication of the second printed book with his name on it, a volume that was guaranteed to cause far more of a stir than his translations of Theophylact Simocatta.

He did, but just barely. In May of 1543, one of the first printed copies of On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres reached Frombork. It perhaps strains credibility to believe popular historian Will Durant’s account of this fulfillment of his life’s work: “He was on his deathbed. He read the title page, smiled, and in the same hour died.” Still, this version is close enough to accurate, and it is a lovely image to contemplate.

Nicolaus Copernicus, having spent 70 years in this mortal vale of tears, was buried in an unmarked grave under the floor of Frombork Cathedral, as was customary for unmarried and unlanded Church functionaries such as him. At the same instant, his book, this product of a strange alliance between Catholics and Protestants, was taking on a life of its own. The genie known as heliocentrism was out of the bottle. It wouldn’t be possible to shove it back inside again — but that wouldn’t prevent lots and lots of people from trying in the century and more to come.

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