Under such popes it is no wonder that Rome and the cities of Italy generally became the homes of art and culture, centers of the new humanistic learning and the shelters of the scholars of the outer world. The Italian universities entered on a period of intellectual and educational development as glorious almost as the art movement that characterized the time. As this was marked by the work of such men as that universal genius Leonardo da Vinci, of Michael Angelo, poet, painter, sculptor, architect; of Raphael, Titian, and Correggio, whose contemporaries were worthy of them in every way, some idea can be attained of the wonderful era that developed. No {20} wonder scholars in every department of learning flocked to Italy for inspiration and the enthusiasm bred of scholarly fellowship in such an environment. From England came men like Linacre, Selling, Grocyn, and Dean Colet; Erasmus came from the Netherlands, and Copernicus from Poland. Copernicus there obtained that scientific training which was later to prove so fruitful in his practical work as a physician and in his scientific work as the founder of modern astronomy. It may be as well to say at the beginning that even Copernicus was not the first to suggest that the earth moved, and not the sun; and that, curiously enough, his anticipator was another churchman, Nicholas of Cusa, the famous Bishop of Brixen. Readers of Janssen's _History of the German People_ will remember that the distinguished historian introduces his monumental work by a short sketch of the career of Cusanus, as he is called, who may be well taken as the typical pre-Reformation scholar and clergyman. Cusa wrote in a manuscript--which is still preserved in the hospital of Cues, or Cusa--published for the first time by Professor Clemens in 1847: "I have long considered that this earth can not be fixed, but moves as do the other stars--_sed movetur ut aliae stellae_." What a curious commentary these words, written more than half a century before Galileo was born, form on the famous expression so often quoted because supposed to have been drawn from Galileo by the condemnation of his doctrine at Rome: {21} _E pur se muove_--"and yet it moves!" Cusanus was a Cardinal, the personal friend of three popes, and he seems to have had no hesitation in expressing his opinion in the matter. In the same manuscript the Cardinal adds: "And to my mind the earth revolves upon its axis once in a day and a night." Cusanus was, moreover, one of the most independent thinkers that the world has ever seen, yet he was intrusted by the pope about the middle of the fifteenth century with the reformation of abuses in the Church in Germany. The pope seems to have been glad to be able to secure a man of such straightforward ways for his reformatory designs.