section_path: Life/Work/Protestant attacks on the Copernican system
section_name: Protestant attacks on the Copernican system
paragraph_text: Protestant attacks on the Copernican system
  
  Some of Copernicus's close friends turned Protestant, but Copernicus never showed a tendency in that direction. The first attacks on him came from Protestants. Wilhelm Gnapheus, a Dutch refugee settled in Elbląg, wrote a comedy in Latin, Morosophus (The Foolish Sage), and staged it at the Latin school that he had established there. In the play, Copernicus was caricatured as the eponymous Morosophus, a haughty, cold, aloof man who dabbled in astrology, considered himself inspired by God, and was rumored to have written a large work that was moldering in a chest.
  
  Elsewhere Protestants were the first to react to news of Copernicus's theory. Melanchthon wrote:
  
  Some people believe that it is excellent and correct to work out a thing as absurd as did that Sarmatian astronomer who moves the earth and stops the sun. Indeed, wise rulers should have curbed such light-mindedness.
  
  Nevertheless, in 1551, eight years after Copernicus's death, astronomer Erasmus Reinhold published, under the sponsorship of Copernicus's former military adversary, the Protestant Duke Albert, the Prussian Tables, a set of astronomical tables based on Copernicus's work. Astronomers and astrologers quickly adopted it in place of its predecessors.