Nicolaus Copernicus 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,
De revolutionibus orbium coelestium De revolutionibus orbium coelestium De revolutionibus orbium coelestium ("On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres") is the seminal work on the heliocentric theory of the Renaissance astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543). The book, first printed in 1543 in Nuremberg, Holy Roman Empire, offered an alternative model of the universe to Ptolemy's geocentric system, which had been widely accepted since ancient times. Copernicus initially outlined his system in a short, untitled, anonymous manuscript that he distributed to several friends, referred to as the "Commentariolus". A physician's library list dating to 1514 includes a manuscript whose description matches the "Commentariolus", so Copernicus must