Lucas Watzenrode

Lucas Watzenrode the Younger (sometimes Watzelrode and Waisselrod; German: Lucas Watzenrode der Jüngere; Polish: Łukasz Watzenrode; 30 October 1447 – 29 March 1512) was Prince-Bishop of Warmia (Ermeland) and patron to his nephew, the astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus.

The family and its name stemmed from the Silesian village of Pszenno (in German Weizenrodau "wheat uprooting"). Watzenrode was born in Thorn (Toruń), son of the merchant Lucas Watzenrode the Elder (1400–62). He studied at Jagiellonian University and at Cologne and Bologna.

After his sister Barbara and her husband Niklas Koppernigk died in about 1483, Lucas cared for their four children, Katharina, Barbara, Andreas and Nicolaus, the last of whom would become known as the astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus.

The Bishopric of Warmia, previously part of the Monastic State of the Teutonic Knights, had, with the Second Peace of Thorn (1466), come under the sovereignty of the King of Poland. Based on that treaty, the Polish King had the right to appoint the Bishop. Neither the Warmia chapter, however, nor their newly elected bishop, Nicolaus von Tüngen (1467–89), acknowledged the King's right to do so.

Poland contested von Tüngen's election, and this led to the War of the Priests (1467–79) and the First Treaty of Piotrków Trybunalski (1479), by which the chapter was obliged to seek consensus with the Polish king. The Bishopric of Warmia was made suffragan to the Archbishopric of Riga, then headed by Archbishop Michael Hildebrand.

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