After the elementary training in the Thorn school,[74] the lad entered the university at Cracow, his father's former home, where he studied under the faculty of arts from 1491-1494.[75] Nowhere else north of the Alps at this time were mathematics and astronomy in better standing than at this university.[76] Sixteen teachers taught these subjects there during the years of Copernicus's stay, but no record exists of his work under any of them.[77] That he must have studied these two sciences there, however, is proved by Rheticus's remark in the _Narratio Prima_[78] that Copernicus, after leaving Cracow, went to Bologna to work with Dominicus Maria di Novara "non tarn discipulus quam adjutor." He left Cracow without receiving a degree,[79] returned to Thorn in 1494 when he and his family decided he should enter the Church after first studying in Italy.[80] Consequently he crossed the Alps in 1496 and was that winter matriculated at Bologna in the "German nation."[81] 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.[82] He remained in Italy, however, about ten years altogether, studying civil law at Bologna, and canon law and medicine at Padua,[83] yet receiving his degree as doctor of canon law from the university of Ferrara in 1503.[84] He was also in Rome for several months during the Jubilee year, 1500. [Footnote 74: Ibid: I, 111.] [Footnote 75: Ibid: I, 124-129.] [Footnote 76: Ibid: I, 137.] [Footnote 77: Ibid: I, 141-143.] [Footnote 78: Rheticus: _Narratio Prima_, 448 (Thorn edit.).] [Footnote 79: Prowe: I, 154.] [Footnote 80: Ibid: I, 169.] [Footnote 81: Ibid: I, 174.] [Footnote 82: Ibid: I, 175. This insured him an annual income which amounted to a sum equalling about $2250 today. Later he received a sinecure appointment besides at Breslau. (Holden in _Pop. Sci._, 111.)] [Footnote 83: Prowe: I, 224.] [Footnote 84: Ibid: I, 308.] At this period the professor of astronomy at Bologna was the famous teacher Dominicus Maria di Novara (1454-1504), a man "ingenio et animo liber" who dared to attack the immutability of the Ptolemaic system, since his own observations, especially of the Pole Star, differed by a degree and more from the traditional ones.[85] He dared to criticise the long accepted system and to emphasize the Pythagorean notion of the underlying harmony and simplicity in nature[86]; and from him Copernicus may have acquired these ideas, for whether they lived together or not in Bologna, they were closely associated. It was here, too, that Copernicus began his study of Greek which later was to be the means[87] of encouraging him in his own theorizing by acquainting him with the ancients who had thought along similar lines.