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MODERN TIMES sense of the word, ministers of finance to King Sigismund I. The king's secretaries, being patrician's sons, such as Decius, Nidecki, Górnicki, Kromer, are all eminent men of letters. The rich citizens pay homage to the spirit of the new era; they build their private houses in Renascence style, on the model of the royal castle, and on the fronts of them they put, for inscriptions, Latin sentences from classic authors, cut in stone or marble, of which many are still legible. Outside the town they build magnificent villas, such as that of Justus Decius in Wola Justowska, or modest manor-houses, where they spend the summer. Their richly endowed daughters are often married to nobles and princes. The presence of so many distinguished representatives and protagonists of humanist science and culture at Cracow created an intellectual atmosphere and made the town one of the centres of Occidental civilization. The unbroken relations of Polish scholars with the heads and leaders of European learning are reflected alike in science, poetry, and historiography. The printing-press of Cracow attained to a high level of excellence. In 1503, the printer Caspar Hochfeder, of Metz, came to Cracow at the suggestion of a wealthy bookseller, Haller by name. This John Haller, a native of Rothenburg on the Tauber, then established a printing-press in his own town house, in 1525, and a paper-mill at Pradnik. His example prompted a good many others to do the like; Hermann Viëtor (who established his printing-office in 1510), Matthew Scharffenberg, Florian Ungler, and others, succeeded in keeping up the high reputation of Cracow printing for two centuries. The public institutions of the town were mostly reformed and reorganized; thus, the hospitals, which had existed since the thirteenth century were, in the sixteenth, enlarged and practically founded anew.

Besides the nations already mentioned (Poles, Germans, Italians), the Jews formed a large part of the town's population. Most of them had fled, or were descended from such as had fled, from Germany because of the religious persecutions of the Middle Ages. Certain quarters of the city were assigned to them; but