Nicolaus Copernicus of his life. At the instance of Roger Boscovich, the Catholic Church's 1758 "Index of Prohibited Books" omitted the general prohibition of works defending heliocentrism, but retained the specific prohibitions of the original uncensored versions of "De revolutionibus" and Galileo's "Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems". Those prohibitions were finally dropped from the 1835 "Index". There has been discussion of Copernicus' 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 polyglot region of the Kingdom of Poland. He was
Nicolaus Copernicus first to react to news of Copernicus's theory. Melanchthon wrote: 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. Some time before 1514 Copernicus made available to friends his "Commentariolus" ("Little Commentary"), a manuscript describing his ideas about the heliocentric hypothesis. It contained seven basic assumptions (detailed below). Thereafter he continued gathering data for a more detailed work. About 1532 Copernicus had