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 for nineteen years until his death in 1483. Thereupon his mother's brother, Lucas Watzelrode, later bishop of Ermeland, became his guardian, benefactor and close friend.

After the elementary training in the Thorn school, the lad entered the university at Cracow, his father's former home, where he studied under the faculty of arts from 1491-1494. Nowhere else north of the Alps at this time were mathematics and astronomy in better standing than at this university. Sixteen teachers taught these subjects there during the years of Copernicus's stay, but no record exists of his work under any of them. That he must have studied these two sciences there, however, is proved by Rheticus's remark in the Narratio Prima that Copernicus, after leaving Cracow, went to Bologna to work with Dominicus Maria di Novara "non tam discipulus quam adjutor." He left Cracow without receiving a degree, returned to Thorn in 1494 when he and his family decided he should enter the Church after first studying in Italy. Consequently he crossed the Alps in 1496 and was that winter matriculated at Bologna in the "German nation." The following summer he received word of his appointment to fill a vacancy among the canons of the cathedral chapter at Ermeland where his uncle had been bishop since 1489. He remained in Italy, however, about ten years altogether, studying civil law at Bologna, and canon law and medicine at Padua, yet receiving his degree as doctor of canon law from the university of Ferrara in 1503. He was also in Rome for several months during the Jubilee year, 1500.

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