Which bishop and friend of Copernicus encouraged him to publish De revolutionibus?

Tiedemann Giese was the bishop and friend of Copernicus who encouraged him to publish De revolutionibus.

Giese was a churchman from Danzig and a close friend of Nicolaus Copernicus. He later became bishop of Chełmno and then prince-bishop of Warmia. Giese supported Copernicus’s astronomical work and urged him not to hide the principles behind his theory of planetary motion.

Copernicus’s hesitation was understandable: heliocentrism challenged the widely accepted Ptolemaic, Earth-centered cosmos, and his calculations were mathematically demanding. Giese was not the only supporter. The young mathematician Georg Joachim Rheticus strongly pressed Copernicus to publish, while Cardinal Nikolaus von Schönberg had earlier urged him to release the work.

De revolutionibus was finally printed in Nuremberg in 1543, the year Copernicus died. A frequent confusion is Andreas Osiander, who supplied the controversial anonymous preface presenting the book’s model as a mathematical hypothesis. Giese instead was the bishop-friend associated with encouraging publication and defending Copernicus’s intentions.