In Game:
Nicolaus Copernicus, also known as Mikołaj Kopernik and Niccolò Copernico, was a Polish Renaissance astronomer, mathematician, and priest.
In 1500, Copernicus visited the Vatican, where he was introduced to the Templar Order. Upon joining them, he was later told that they wanted him to keep his discoveries secret.
A day after, however, he enlightened the public on science and mathematics at the Il Campidoglio, encouraging them to question past teachings, as he could not keep his findings to himself. He went on to urge the crowd to visit him or his fellow scholars if they wished to know more.
As soon as the Borgia – the leading house in the Templar Order – heard of this, they sent their guards to kill Copernicus and the other scholars. The Assassin Ezio Auditore da Firenze watched the scene unfold and, upon realizing their common enemy, came to Copernicus' aid.
Copernicus admitted his affiliations to the Templars to Ezio, though the latter was willing to help Copernicus reach a safe location. Upon arriving in a secluded building in the Antico District, Copernicus asked Ezio to deliver some documents to his fellow scholars, which would inform them of the danger they were in. Though doubtful if he could trust him, Ezio agreed, and aided most of the scholars in going into hiding.
The Assassin returned some time later, and by then, Copernicus had concluded that the Master of the Sacred Palace was most likely behind the plot to kill him. Ezio sought out the Master and heard from him that there were six executioners walking around Rome, searching for the scholars. Ezio rushed to take these executioners down, and returned to Copernicus with the confirmation that his suspicion had been correct.
Copernicus, however, was persistent in going out into the open to study a lunar eclipse. The Master of the Sacred Palace seized this opportunity, and sent a Papal Guard to kill him. Ezio followed and killed the Master of the Sacred Palace before returning to Copernicus, with whom he took down the assailants. The pair then went their separate ways, with Copernicus staying behind to study the eclipse.
Following their encounter, Copernicus became an ally of the Assassin Order, and was assisted in further astronomical studies with Novara via the Order's protection, with one instance including the Assassins Francesco Vecellio and Cipriano Enu.
In Real Life:
Certain facts about Nicolaus Copernicus’s early life are well established, although a biography written by his ardent disciple Georg Joachim Rheticus is unfortunately lost. According to a later horoscope, Nicolaus Copernicus was born on February 19, 1473, in Toruń, a city in north-central Poland on the Vistula River south of the major Baltic seaport of Gdańsk. His father, Nicolaus, was a well-to-do merchant, and his mother, Barbara Watzenrode, also came from a leading merchant family. Nicolaus was the youngest of four children. After his father’s death, sometime between 1483 and 1485, his mother’s brother Lucas Watzenrode took his nephew under his protection. Watzenrode, soon to be bishop of the chapter of Varmia (Warmia), saw to young Nicolaus’s education and his future career as a church canon.
Between 1491 and about 1494 Copernicus studied liberal arts—including astronomy and astrology—at the University of Cracow (Kraków). Like many students of his time, however, he left before completing his degree, resuming his studies in Italy at the University of Bologna, where his uncle had obtained a doctorate in canon law in 1473. The Bologna period was short but significant. For a time Copernicus lived in the same house as the principal astronomer at the university, Domenico Maria de Novara.
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Novara also probably introduced Copernicus to two important books that framed his future problematic as a student of the heavens: Epitoma in Almagestum Ptolemaei (“Epitome of Ptolemy’s Almagest”) by Johann Müller (also known as Regiomontanus, 1436–76) and Disputationes adversus astrologianm divinatricenm (“Disputations against Divinatory Astrology”) by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–94). The first provided a summary of the foundations of Ptolemy’s astronomy, with Regiomontanus’s corrections and critical expansions of certain important planetary models that might have been suggestive to Copernicus of directions leading to the heliocentric hypothesis. Pico’s Disputationes offered a devastating skeptical attack on the foundations of astrology that reverberated into the 17th century. Among Pico’s criticisms was the charge that, because astronomers disagreed about the order of the planets, astrologers could not be certain about the strengths of the powers issuing from the planets.
Only 27 recorded observations are known for Copernicus’s entire life (he undoubtedly made more than that), most of them concerning eclipses, alignments, and conjunctions of planets and stars. The first such known observation occurred on March 9th, 1497, at Bologna. By the time he published this observation in 1543, he had made it the basis of a theoretical claim: that it confirmed exactly the size of the apparent lunar diameter. But in 1497 he was probably using it to assist in checking the new- and full-moon tables derived from the commonly used Alfonsine Tables and employed in Novara’s forecast for the year 1498.
In 1500 Copernicus spoke before an interested audience in Rome on mathematical subjects, but the exact content of his lectures is unknown. In 1501 he stayed briefly in Frauenburg but soon returned to Italy to continue his studies, this time at the University of Padua, where he pursued medical studies between 1501 and 1503. At this time medicine was closely allied with astrology, as the stars were thought to influence the body’s dispositions. Thus, Copernicus’s astrological experience at Bologna was better training for medicine than one might imagine today. Copernicus later painted a self-portrait; it is likely that he acquired the necessary artistic skills while in Padua, since there was a flourishing community of painters there and in nearby Venice.
In May 1503 Copernicus finally received a doctorate—like his uncle, in canon law—but from an Italian university where he had not studied: the University of Ferrara. When he returned to Poland, Bishop Watzenrode arranged a sinecure for him: an in absentia teaching post at Wrocław. Copernicus’s actual duties at the bishopric palace, however, were largely administrative and medical. As a church canon, he collected rents from church-owned lands; secured military defenses; oversaw chapter finances; managed the bakery, brewery, and mills; and cared for the medical needs of the other canons and his uncle. Copernicus’s astronomical work took place in his spare time, apart from these other obligations.
He proposed that the planets have the Sun as the fixed point to which their motions are to be referred; that Earth is a planet which, besides orbiting the Sun annually, also turns once daily on its own axis; and that very slow, long-term changes in the direction of this axis account for the procession of the equinoxes. This representation of the heavens is usually called the heliocentric, or “Sun-centred,” system—derived from the Greek helios, meaning “Sun.” Copernicus’s theory had important consequences for later thinkers of the scientific revolution, including such major figures as Galileo, Kepler, Descartes, and Newton. Copernicus probably hit upon his main idea sometime between 1508 and 1514, and during those years he wrote a manuscript usually called the Commentariolus (“Little Commentary”). However, the book that contains the final version of his theory, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium libri vi (“Six Books Concerning the Revolutions of the Heavenly Orbs”), did not appear in print until 1543, the year of his death.
