Giordano Bruno

by Ingrid D. Rowland

  He replied: “I willingly confess my errors now, and am here in the hands of Your Illustrious Lordships to receive the remedy for my health; about my repentance for my misdeeds I could never say enough or express my intentions as effectively as I would wish.” Then, on his knees, he said: “I humbly beg pardon of the Lord God and Your Illustrious Lordships for all the errors I have committed, and am ready to carry out whatever your prudence shall have deliberated and judged expedient to my soul … and if by the mercy of God and Your Most Illustrious Lordships I am allowed to live, I promise to make a notable reform of my life, and repay every scandal with edification.”

  For the moment, the Venetian inquisitors had no choice but to let Bruno live. But they did not release him from prison. Instead, they turned to face the Inquisition in Rome.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  The Witness

  SMITHO: There were two of them?

  PRUDENZIO: Ut essent duo testes.

  FRULLA: What do you mean by those testes?

  PRUDENZIO: Witnesses, proven testifiers to the Nolan competence.

  —The Ash Wednesday Supper, dialogue 1

  To long for that which comes not. To lye a bed and sleepe not. To serve well and please not. To lye in iayle and hope not. To bee sick and recover not. To loose ones waye and knowe not. To waite at doore and enter not, and to have a friend we trust not; are ten such spites as hell hath not.

  —John Florio, Second Frutes (1591)

  When the Roman Inquisition asked Venice to extradite a prisoner, as it did on occasion, the Venetians normally refused. Rome let them refuse because Venice meant money and all that money could buy, including, notably, military security: the Venetian fleet had bested the Turks at Lepanto in 1571, and no pope as yet had been inclined to forget that favor.

  But by 1592, Lepanto lay nearly a generation in the past, and German Protestants loomed as large on the threshold of Roman fear as the infidel. News about Bruno’s arrest had traveled to Rome, and in 1592 the Holy Office requested his extradition, not least because of his German connections. For once, Venice hinted that it might be willing to negotiate. The republic needed money, and it needed Rome as an ally against Germany and Spain, which now ruled Milan and pressed insistently against Venetian-held lands in northern Italy. Besides, Bruno’s offers to retract his statements may well have sounded more expedient to his examiners than sincere: for once, the bargain he had to offer if they used him to reassert Venetian independence could not compare with the offers coming from Rome. The diplomatic process that procured Giordano Bruno’s extradition to Rome took months, from the end of July to the middle of February of the following year. On February 20, 1593, Giordano Bruno was loaded onto a ship and sailed down the coast to Ancona, made the trip westward over the Apennines along the ancient course of the Via Flaminia, and reached the prisons of the Roman Inquisition seven days later, on February 27. He would spend just under seven years inside this forbidding palazzo just off Saint Peter’s Square, as workmen continued to put the final touches on the facade of the huge basilica, almost ninety years in the making. As a bargaining chip, he was probably treated with some care, in transit and on arrival. As a former courtier in Paris, London, Prague, and Braunschweig, he might still have powerful protectors in those places. Both in Venice and in Rome he seems to have baffled the authorities, a perpetual wanderer with a perpetual power to charm people—and to repel them.

  The Holy Office locked him into a cell of their palazzo just south of Saint Peter’s Basilica, on the square newly dominated by the pink granite obelisk of Caligula, moved to the site by Domenico Fontana only five years before. His cell, private, windowed, in a building perched on dry ground rather than a canal, was in every way an improvement over his crowded pen in Venice. A later report criticizes those cells for their spaciousness and the opportunity they afforded prisoners for conversation; for the moment, at least, Bruno’s physical circumstances were tolerable. He was permitted to read only what pertained to his impending trial, assigned a pen, but forbidden a compass or penknife.

  The Roman Inquisition kept its prisoners well by the standards of the time. A team of inspectors came through every six months to ensure that the inmates were properly fed, clothed, and housed; Bruno was issued a warm mantle and a beret to keep off a dank Roman winter that could hardly have compared in severity with the Venetian winter he had just spent by the Arsenal. But the Holy Office in Rome also practiced juridical torture in its chambers, and it regularly handed over convicted heretics to the city prison of Tor di Nona, where they could contemplate the impaled heads of former inmates as they crossed the ancient Roman bridge built by the emperor Hadrian fourteen centuries before. Because the Inquisition itself claimed to shed no blood, its punishments were exacted here by the state’s “secular arm.” Blood flowed in Tor di Nona in abundance, and the piazza between the prison and the bridge was one of Rome’s most active execution grounds.

  In the spring of 1593, Giordano Bruno had no immediate reason to fear being transferred to Tor di Nona. Unless new evidence emerged, his case with the Inquisition could proceed no further than it had already. The Roman inquisitors could do no more than to review records from the Venetian proceedings and begin to assemble a more accurate collection of Bruno’s writings than the Venetians had been able to do.

  Within a few months, however, in the fall of 1593, a second witness made his appearance: Bruno’s old cellmate and frequent adversary from Venice, Fra Celestino Arrigoni da Verona, newly transferred from prison to a Capuchin convent in the Marches, the region along the east coast of Italy, where he had been put under observation; in modern terms, the troubled friar had been institutionalized. Convinced (wrongly) that Bruno had incriminated him in his own interviews with the inquisitors, Fra Celestino, in a combination of vindictive rage and fear for his life, wrote a letter to the Roman Inquisition reporting his conversations with Bruno in prison. Although in the normal social world both Giovanni Mocenigo and Fra Celestino were unstable individuals and recognized as cranks, in the world of the Inquisition they still provided the necessary two witnesses for prosecuting a heretic. (In 1599, Bruno once again crossed paths with his accuser Fra Celestino da Verona, whose years under close supervision had not brought his behavior into much better control. The Capuchin had been arrested again for heresy and taken to Rome. This time he was on trial as a recidivist rather than as a first-time offender. He was condemned and burned at the stake in the same year.)

  Fra Celestino’s report to the inquisitors was hardly a trenchant critique of the Nolan philosophy; it provided the kind of evidence that the Venetian Inquisition tended to throw away if at all possible. But the mad Capuchin was a witness nonetheless, and as such he changed the nature of the case against Giordano Bruno:

  He [Fra Celestino] says that he deposes against Giordano, because he suspects that he has been slanderously denounced by the same, and informed against Giordano in writing. He reports that Giordano has said:

  1. That Christ committed a mortal sin when he made his prayer in the Garden refusing the will of the Father, when he said: “Father, if possible, let this cup pass me by.”

  2. That Christ was not put on a cross, but hanged on two beams as was done in those days, and called a forca.

  3. That Christ is a dog cuckold fucked dog; he said that the ruler of this world was a traitor, because he could not rule it well, and raising his hand he gave the finger to heaven.

  4. That there is no hell, that no one is damned to eternal punishment, but in time everyone shall be saved, citing the prophet: Shall God be angry forever?

  5. That there are many worlds, and all the stars are worlds, and believing that this is the only world is supreme ignorance.

  6. That when bodies die their souls transmigrate from one world to the other, in the many worlds, and from one body to another.

  7. That Moses was a shrewd magician and because he was so experienced in the art of magic, he easily beat the magicians of Pharaoh, and that he only pretended t
o talk to God on Mount Sinai, and that the law he gave to the Hebrew people was made up and created by himself.

  8. That all the prophets were shrewd men, but false and lying, and because of that they came to a bad end; that is, they were condemned by law to a shameful death, as they deserved.

  9. That praying for intercession to the saints is a ridiculous thing, not to be done.

  10. That Cain was a good man, and that he was right to kill Abel his brother, because Abel was a wretch and a butcher of animals.

  11. That if he had to go back to being a Dominican friar, he wanted to blow up the monastery, and when he had done that, he wanted to return to Germany or England among the heretics where he could live in his own way more comfortably and plant his new and infinite heresies there. And I intend to produce as witnesses Francesco Girolami, Silvio, canon of Chioggia, and Fra Serafino of Acquasparta.

  12. The person who compiled the breviary is an ugly dog fucked cuckold, shameless, and the breviary is like an out-of-tune lute, and in it there are many things that are profane and irrelevant, and therefore it is not worth reading by serious men, but ought to be burned.

  13. That nothing of what the Church believes can be proved. As witnesses, he named Fra Giulio da Salò, Francesco Vaio, and Matteo d’Orio, cellmates.

  Now the inquisitors tracked down all of Bruno’s former cellmates from Venice to question them about their conversations in prison. More than a year had elapsed, and one of them, Francesco Vaio, had died in the meantime. Although Fra Celestino’s reports were invariably more lurid than the others’, the testimony of all the witnesses was consistent, dangerously so for Bruno’s position.

  It is most likely that the original records for Bruno’s trial in Rome no longer exist. Napoleon Bonaparte, who had ordered the razing of San Domenico di Castello in Venice, also attacked the memory of the Inquisition in Rome. Many of its records were bundled up in the Vatican and taken off to Paris, only to be shipped back in 1814, in the aftermath of Waterloo. A good deal was lost in transit in both directions; carts were upset en route, and some papers seem to have been turned into cardboard. What does survive in the Holy Office is a summary of Bruno’s trial, divided according to the various points, twenty-nine of them, that counted as heretical. This Summary was first discovered in 1941 by the head of the Vatican’s Secret Archive, Angelo Mercati, who published it with an extensive, vituperative commentary. It quotes extensive passages both from the Venetian records of Bruno’s trial and from the missing Roman papers, and from these we can reconstruct the general course of the proceedings.

  The first of Bruno’s Venetian cellmates to be recalled in this second phase of the trial was Fra Giuliano da Salò:

  When Giordano was discussing with the prisoner Fra Celestino, I heard him say that Christ Our Lord had committed a mortal sin in this world because he wanted to oppose the will of the Father, when he prayed in the Garden, saying, “If possible, let this cup pass from me,” and Francesco Marangon of Naples was there, too, and I said to him: “Listen to what blasphemies this man says!” and I think this was September 1592.

  The Roman inquisitor, confronted with the transcripts of Bruno’s Venetian depositions, began to realize how little they knew about him. He had mentioned books and treatises to his examiners, but in fact the Holy Office in Rome had no idea what he had written, nor how much. They questioned him, and for once the master of memory hesitated. It would take the inquisitors years to assemble an adequate list, as Bruno waited in his Roman cell, watching prisoners come and go through the purgative system of the Holy Office. For most the experience lasted a few months. Most were let off with a reprimand, but some faced the full brutality of sixteenth-century Italian justice.

  The punishment of criminals in Rome, as elsewhere in Europe, was a public spectacle designed to deter citizens from wrongdoing. (An exception was Alfonso Cardinal Petrucci, discreetly strangled with a scarlet cord in the depths of Castel Sant’Angelo for attempting to assassinate Pope Leo X in 1517. The executioner was a huge Moor, who, as an infidel, could kill a prince of the Church without ulterior fear for the fate of his immortal soul.) In unconscious obedience to ancient Roman religious belief, lower-class criminals were hanged, aristocrats beheaded (a procedure that had once been thought to leave them in possession of their souls). Traitors, sex offenders, witches, and heretics were treated more theatrically and more severely, traitors drawn and quartered, the others burned in a civic version of the Lord’s refining fire.

  Two years into Bruno’s Roman imprisonment, a Scots priest was hauled into the Holy Office for interrogation. Unlike most of his fellow prisoners, he may already have been manhandled by his captors, for his offense had been one of action rather than ideas. Walter Merse, an Anglican, had interrupted the Mass. By elevating the Host, the Catholic priest had committed idolatry in the Protestant’s eyes, and Merse had begun to shout his objections; neither did the Scotsman agree with the Catholic claim that the consecrated bread had turned into the literal body of Jesus Christ. His experience in the prisons of the Holy Office did not change his mind. When he was finally convicted in the following year, he was burned alive in a shirt soaked with pitch (as described in Chapter 1).

  In Bruno’s case, for the time being the inquisitors decided that they needed more information about him and his writings. They asked him for a list of his publications and searched on their own for copies of his books, suspecting, correctly, that he might not give them a complete list. Bruno, for his part, was allowed the paper, pen, ink, and compasses to draft his defense. In this state of suspension, his imprisonment dragged on for another several years.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  The Adversary

  Well, I am answer’d: now tell me who made the world?

  —Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus

  I hardly ever read a book without wanting to give it a good censoring.

  —Robert Cardinal Bellarmine to Antonio Possevino, 1598

  The prelates who examined Giordano Bruno for the Inquisition were Catholic priests who saw obedience as a supreme virtue. They offered that obedience not only to God but also to various kinds of established authority: the Church, Scripture, and, if only on occasion, the state. The grand inquisitor, Cardinal Santori, had known Bruno in Naples at the convent of San Domenico, where they had received the same training in theology and argumentation. Each in his turn had also absorbed the powerful convent’s culture of independence and, on occasion, revolution. Santori, in fact, had joined the Neapolitan revolt of 1563, when the friars of San Domenico led the city’s resistance to an attempt to impose the Spanish Inquisition. As inquisitor, he would defend this youthful action as a defense of Roman, and hence papal, authority: the revolt had ensured that Naples, and the inquisitors at San Domenico, would continue to observe the rules of the Roman Inquisition. It seems unlikely, however, that obedience to Rome had ranked high among the young Santori’s motives in 1563. The young rebel had grown into an old conservative, but a canny one.

  The fact that Bruno’s trial dragged on year after year suggests that Santori and his fellow inquisitors could find no plausible way to obtain a conviction. By Roman rules, they could not turn Bruno’s trial into an endgame without observing due process. They found their solution in the person of the Jesuit theologian Roberto Bellarmino of Montepulciano, known in English as Robert Bellarmine, by all reports the most incisive theological mind of the outgoing sixteenth century. In 1599, six years into Bruno’s imprisonment, Pope Clement VIII granted Bellarmine a cardinal’s hat, making it possible to appoint him directly to the board of inquisitors general, which he had been serving as a consultant since 1592, the very first Jesuit to join the Dominicans in their traditional undertaking. For Santori, who had spent the first decades of his life under a despotic monarchy in the Kingdom of Naples, it is easy to see how obedience must have been inculcated in him from childhood (and how badly the lesson took at first). But Robert Bellarmine came from Montepulciano in Tuscany, where local tradition looked b
ack to the Etruscans for a model of republican liberty, even after a Medici despot proclaimed himself Grand Duke of Etruria in 1538.

  A fifteenth-century Tuscan chronicle reported that Robert Bellarmine’s family had descended from two handsome Armenians—in Italian, “belli Armeni”—who had helped the Etruscan warlord Lars Porsenna found a hilltop city some five hundred years before the birth of Christ. For its supreme civility, Porsenna’s utopia was called Mons Politicus—“Civic Mountain”—a name that would be transformed over the centuries into Montepulciano. And in fact sixteenth-century Montepulciano came as close as any contemporary city to a real Mons Politicus. For centuries it had been a pawn in power struggles between Florence and Rome, but a Florentine victory in 1511 allowed its citizens to concentrate at last on making money off the fertile lands beneath them, the silt-rich remnants of an Etruscan lake. To commemorate their prize, the Florentines erected a marble column near the town’s lower gate, topped by a marble image of the Florentine lion, the Marzocco, and a terra-cotta statue of Lars Porsenna himself. Born in one of the magnificent town’s most elegant palazzi, Robert Bellarmine followed the career that most wealthy Italian families dictated for their second sons: joining the Church. It was the easiest way to curb any future claims to an inheritance. Robert Bellarmine was not the first of his line to do so; his maternal uncle Marcello Cervini had been appointed cardinal in 1539 and was elected pope in 1555 (he took ill after his coronation and died after a reign of three weeks).

  Six years older than Giordano Bruno, Robert Bellarmine entered religious life in 1560, at the age of eighteen. Rather than one of the traditional orders, he chose the newest, and in many ways the most exciting: the Society of Jesus, officially recognized by Pope Paul III only in 1539. Those first Jesuits were forbidden to take higher office in the Church, and Bellarmine would later say (albeit as cardinal) that he had entered the order specifically to avoid any chance of undeserved promotion, thereby emphasizing, as he so often did in his long life, his great personal modesty. Most other Jesuits had been attracted by other qualities about the Society—namely, its energy, its sense of spiritual mission, and its intellectual rigor. They were pioneers in a literal sense: foot soldiers for a militant Church, and their combination of brains and bravery soon made them a power to reckon with.