The humanist, natural scientist, historiographer and diplomat Johannes Cuspinianus was born in Schweinfurt in December 1473.
After studying in Leipzig and Würzburg, Cuspinian came to Vienna in 1492, where he was crowned a poet by Maximilian I. He was one of the most important scholars of the time. He was one of the most important scholars at the University of Vienna at the beginning of the 16th century. After the death of Konrad Celtis (1508), he became the leading figure of the Viennese humanist circle. Cuspinian's sphere of influence extended far beyond the university sphere and also touched the sphere of the highest politics, where in diplomatic service he played a decisive role in the realisation of the Habsburg-Jagiellonian marriage plans. He embodied in an exemplary manner the type of humanist Renaissance scholar who combined universalism and cosmopolitanism with an existence rooted in the bourgeois urban sphere.
