Who was Giovanni Riccioli, and what did he contribute to geocentrism?

Riccioli was a very famous geocentrist. What I remember most about his work concerns the orbits of the planets. Copernicus had said the planets revolve around the sun in perfect circles, because the Greeks, following Plato, held that the circle was the most perfect form. When Copernicus forced the planets into perfect circles he could never get the orbits to work; that is the problem he faced when his book was finally published, and he was actually afraid to publish it for that reason. To make it fit he had to use epicycles, the very thing he had accused Ptolemy of doing. Ptolemy, in his second-century geocentric model, had used epicycles plus a device called the equant to smooth things out, and that made his model useful and widely accepted, including by seafarers who navigated by the stars. Copernicus threw out the equant, kept perfect circles, and ended up needing even more epicycles than Ptolemy, forty-eight to Ptolemy's forty, and still could not get it right. The cure came when Kepler put the planets in elliptical orbits rather than perfect circles. What is great about Riccioli is that he took Kepler's ellipses and applied them to the geocentric model of Tycho Brahe, in which the planets go around the sun while the sun goes around the earth, and it worked perfectly. So Riccioli showed that the same tool Kepler used for the heliocentric side works just as well for the geocentric side, making the geocentric system just as viable. He wrote a treatise of over five hundred pages on it, as did many committed Catholic geocentrists of that time who were fighting the heliocentrists. There was also a non-Catholic, Rheticus, who actually published a heliocentric work before Copernicus did; his work was condemned and placed on the index of forbidden books. He was a Protestant. That is why we still remember Riccioli.