section_path: Languages, name, nationality/Nationality
section_name: Nationality
paragraph_text: Nationality
  
  There has been discussion of Copernicus's 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 multilingual 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. Copernicus's 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.
  
  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 was a subject of the Polish crown", while Manfred Weissenbacher writes that Copernicus's father was a Germanized Pole. Andrzej Wojtkowski noted that most of the 19th and 20th century encyclopedias, particularly the English-language sources, described Copernicus as a "German scientist". Kasparek and Kasparek stated that it is incorrect to ascribe him German or Polish nationality, as "a 16th century figure cannot be described with the use of 19th and 20th century concepts".
  
  No Polish texts by Copernicus survive due to the rarity of Polish language in literature 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."