Page:Edinburgh Review Volume 158.djvu/317

302 Prowe's Life of Copernicus. Oct. named Niklas Koppernigk removed the seat of his business from Cracow to Thorn. His patronymic was of the local character ordinarily found in Poland. It indicated a migration, of his ancestors from the village of Kopirnik near Frankenstein in Silesia, and possibly also commemorated their early relations with certain then existent copper-mines, from the neighbourhood of which the village in question had derived its title. Nicholas was a well-to-do-man. He carried on mercantile transactions on a considerable scale in Dantzic and Breslau, as well as in Cracow and Thorn ; in 1458 he was admitted to the citizenship of his adopted town, and exercised judicial or assessorial functions there during nineteen years. Although well advanced towards middle life when he left Cracow, he was still unmarried; but repaired the omission, some time previous to 1464, by taking to wife Barbara Watzelrode, a member of a distinguished family in which the highest civic dignities of Thorn had been hereditary for close upon a century. The youngest of four children — two sons and two daughters — born of this union, came into the world in an old house, of which the walls are still standings at the corner of St. Anne's Street and the Street of Bakers, on February 19, 1473, and was baptised by his father's name.

Thorn was at that time a thriving town of about 20,000 inhabitants. In aspect it appears to have remained substantially unchanged. It is even now enclosed by the ancient walls, and access is had to its quaint streets by the ancient gates ; only the busy suburbs have disappeared which, in the fifteenth century, formed the scene of its most active trades. Nevertheless, its prosperity was then already on the decline.

Founded in 1231 by the Teutonic Knights, the com