It was the year 1512. Across Europe, an all-out war had been raging for four years between a Roman pope and the Republic of Venice – in this war, papal states, Venice, Spain, France, England and several other kingdoms and dukedoms in succession joined ‘holy’ confederations and coalitions.
Although this unrest resembled so many previous and subsequent ones, life at this time was different from ours. Apart from political alliances and wars, people still thought about the world in medieval terms. Harbingers of the new age, however, were coming, and getting closer, like a traveller approaching.
During 1512, people rarely travelled, and when they did, it was by day. They would meet trade caravans protected by armed guards, debauched goliard poets and preachers who called to abnegation and spoke horribly at great length about Hell. The painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus by famous Flemish painter Pieter Bruegel senior depicts a part of this atmosphere.
Somewhere in a distant Italian plain, on a dirt road circling the Po River, down the road a 19-year-old Swiss student Phillipus von Hohenheim was coming. He arrived at Ferrara, where he was to study the knowledge of that time and become the most famous alchemist of the 16th century, who history would know as Paracelsus, and who would lead laboratory studies in a completely new direction.
In the meantime, the future church reformer Martin Luther was travelling to Wittenberg. While Paracelsus was discovering ancient texts copied to folio, Luther had already received a doctorate in theology and taken over a position at the University of Wittenberg. However, a small event which was to change history in the following five centuries was happening further in the north, in a Polish region of Warmia.
Following years of education in natural sciences and travels around Europe, the third random traveller, a Catholic monk Nicolaus Copernicus arrived at the gates of a fortified cathedral in Frombork, in Warmia diocese, in the north of modern Poland, where his uncle had previously lived. This is where he started writing Commentariolus, a short paper which he would send to other European thinkers and which would give birth to the epic On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres (De revolutionibus orbium coelestium).
This book, which introduced the term heliocentric system into planet movement description, would bring about the so-called Copernicus revolution and the onset of a new scientific era in world considerations. The world was transforming into something new.
S.B.
Illustration: The Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, 1558, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium