1883. Prowe's Life of Copernicus. 303
mercial capital of the new State quickly rose to importance. The hands of its merchants held for above one hundred years the threads of communication between central and western Europe. Its ships bore the produce of the Hungarian mines and the Sarmatian plains to the mouth of the Scheldt, and brought back Flemish cloths and Lisbon salt, wine and oil and fruits from the Souths spices and silks from the East. Contingents from Thorn joined the warlike expeditions of the Hanseatic League, and deputies from Thorn attended its councils ; it was not, in fact, until Dantzic, towards the close of the fourteenth century, began to assert the superiority of its maritime situation, that the ' Queen of the Vistula ' ceased to be regarded as the chief representative of Prussian civic existence.
Now Prussian civic existence bore, from the first, a purely German stamp. Although one half of the inhabitants of Thorn are said to have been of Slav origin,[1] they were mainly of the poorer sort, and were held in little account. The merchant-aristocracy of the town was Teutonic in speech and blood ; the municipal laws were framed on German models ; German (or Latin) was the language of courts, of councils, and of guilds. This Teutonic character was jealously maintained during three centuries and upwards of Polish sovereignty. From the epoch of its foundation within five miles of the Polish frontier until now. Thorn has in fact been as an outpost of the Fatherland in a strange country.
Our readers will by this time have perceived that the conflicting national pretensions o ownership in the reformer of astronomy afford a subject of debate as little likely to be speedily exhausted as the succession of the Khalifs or the purpose of the Great Pyramid. His father was a Pole, his mother a German, He was born in a town owing allegiance to the Polish crown, but clinging closely to its German privileges. He was, in a word, a German citizen, but a Polish subject. We shall see that a cosmopolitan education completed the mixed associations of his life.
His father died when he was ten years old, leaving him, with his elder brother Andrew, to the guardianship of his maternal uncle. The charge could not have been placed in more competent hands. Lucas Watzelrode was a man deeply imbued with the culture of his time. Before he was twenty-two he had studied at three universities, and at one of them
- ↑ R * * *, 'Beiträge,' p. 73. The father of Copernicus may be regarded as a Slav germanised by his connexions and associations.
