Johannes Cuspinianus

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Johannes Cuspinianus (born Johan Spießhaymer or Speißheimer) (December 1473-April 19, 1529) was an Austrian humanist, scientist, diplomat, and historian. Born in Spießheim, near Schweinfurt in Franconia, of which Cuspinianus is a Latinization, he studied in Leipzig and Würzburg. He went to Vienna in 1492 and became a professor of medicine at the University of Vienna. He became Rector of the university in 1500 and also served as Royal Superintendent until his death.

A leading scholar, he was the author of De Caesaribus et Imperatoribus and was also given a poet’s laurel wreath by Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor. He was part of an intellectual circle that included Joachim Vadianus and Stiborius. He rendered important service as the discoverer and editor of classical and medieval historical texts. His unfinished Austria (1527-8) was an important historical-geographical regional survey of Lower Austria.

As a diplomat, he served as an envoy to Poland and Hungary and orchestrated the Habsburg and Jagellonian marriage alliance of 1515. In 1515 Sigismund I of Poland entered an alliance with the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I. In return for Maximilian lending weight to the provisions of the 2nd Peace of Thorn, Sigismund consented to the marriage of the children of Vladislaus II of Bohemia and Hungary, his brother, to the grandchildren of Maximilian. Through this double marriage contract, Bohemia and Hungary passed to the House of Habsburg in 1526, on the death of Sigismund's nephew, Louis II.

In 1528 he published the manuscript map of Hungary he had found after 1526, presumably in Buda. The map was edited by Georg Tannstetter from the manuscript of Lazarus Secretarius and was published in Petrus Apianus' printing workshop in Ingolstadt.

Cuspinianus is buried in Vienna's Stephansdom.