Paul of Middelburg

[1] Julius Caesar Scaliger, his godson, called him "Omnium sui sæculi mathematicorum ... facile princeps" (easily the Prince of the mathematicians of his century).

He then taught for a while in Leuven, was invited by the Signoria of Venice to take a chair for sciences in Padua (1480), travelled through Italy, became physician to Francesco Maria I della Rovere, Duke of Urbino, and friend to Maximilian, Archduke of Austria, afterwards emperor.

By the former he was endowed with the Benedictine Abbey St. Christophorus in Castel Durante in 1488, and by the latter he was recommended to Alexander VI for the Bishopric of Fossombrone (Moroni, LXXXV, 314).

Being nominated to that see, in 1494, he destroyed some of his former publications; first "Giudizio dell' anno 1480", in which he had censured a number of mathematicians; then a "Practica de pravis Constellationibus", and a defence of that work against the nephew of Paul II (1484); and finally an "Invectiva in superstitiosum Vatem".

Besides some smaller treatises against usurers and against the superstitious fear of a flood in 1524 (Fossombrone, 1523), he wrote important works on the reform of the Calendar, which procured for him invitations by popes Julius II and Leo X to the Fifth Lateran Council (1512–1518).