Giordano Bruno motion of the stars to be an illusion caused by the rotation of the Earth on its axis; he also preserved the notion of an immobile center, but it was the Sun rather than the Earth. Copernicus also argued the Earth was a planet orbiting the Sun once every year. However he maintained the Ptolemaic hypothesis that the orbits of the planets were composed of perfect circles—deferents and epicycles—and that the stars were fixed on a stationary outer sphere. Despite the widespread publication of Copernicus' work "De revolutionibus orbium coelestium", during Bruno's time most educated Catholics subscribed to the Aristotelian
Christianity in the 16th century thereby turning the Grand Duchy of Moscow into Tsardom of Russia, as it was called in the coronation document. The growing might of the Russian state contributed also to the growing authority of the autocephalous Russian Church. Realizing the necessity of strengthening the ecclesiastic authority in Russia, Boris Godunov managed to persuade the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople Jeremias II to establish a patriarchate in Russia. In 1589, Metropolitan Job of Moscow became the first Patriarch of Moscow and all the Rus', making the Russian Church one of the Orthodox patriarchates. Christianity in the 16th century In 16th-century Christianity, Protestantism came