Europe and the Ottoman Empire: the end of the Middle AgesScience and technology

Publication of Copernicus’s De revolutionibus

Nicolaus Copernicus’s principal work was printed in Nuremberg: it placed the Sun at the center of the universe and described the Earth as one of the planets revolving around it.

Date: 1543year known
Place: Nurembergtoday: Nuremberg, Germany · Western and Central Europe
Participants: Nicolaus Copernicus
Threads: Europe and the Ottoman Empire: the end of the Middle Ages
Also known as: De revolutionibus orbium coelestium; Гелиоцентрическая система

Copernicus long hesitated to publish the book; the manuscript was taken to the printer by his pupil Georg Joachim Rheticus, and the edition was completed by the theologian Andreas Osiander, who added an anonymous preface presenting the theory as merely a hypothesis convenient for calculation. The book came out in the year of its author’s death and had an enormous influence on the Scientific Revolution.

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Related events

Ptolemy’s Almagestc. 150 · Middle East and EgyptCopernicus’s heliocentric system replaced Ptolemy’s model
Waldseemüller mapApril 1507 · Western and Central Europearguing that the Earth is round, Copernicus refers to newly discovered lands, above all America, “named after the ship’s captain who discovered it” — a name that first appeared on the Waldseemüller map