All this debauchery began to cause many in Europe to doubt the papacy. Such doubt first led to derision, then cautious protestation and finally to open revolt by ‘Protestant’ groups outside Italy. The main thrust of the movement was spearheaded in Germany by a country pastor, Martin Luther, in a bold bid to wrangle Christianity away from the clutches of the papacy in Rome.
Awful carnage ensued where Catholic and Protestant armies battled for decades. By the second half of the 16th century many were utterly sickened by the terrible bloodshed and destruction and had began to hope for a saviour or champion who could unite Europe again in peace and prosperity. In the year 1569 all eyes fell on the Bourbon family in the kingdom of Navarre, and on France where the religious crisis between Catholics and Protestants (known as Huguenots) was reaching a turning point.
The rise and rise of Catherine de’Medici
At the head of the military Catholic League in 1569 was the French king, Charles IX, but in reality much of the power of this rather sickly and weak monarch was vested in his ambitious and domineering mother, Catherine de’Medici. Born into the powerful and influential Florentine family in 1519, Catherine's parents were Lorenzo de’Medici, the Duke of Urbino, and Madeleine de la Tour d’Auvergne, the latter linked to the French royal family. Orphaned at a very young age, Catherine was once kept as hostage when the Medici Palace was attacked and occupied by an angry mob of Florentines who revolted against the papacy. Finely educated in convents around the city during the siege of Florence, she was at last set free and taken to Rome after her warring uncle, Pope Clement VII (Giulio de’Medici), crushed the rebellion in Florence. The pope then negotiated with King Francis I of France for Catherine – at that time just 14-years-old – to marry the king's second eldest son, Henry of Orléans.
Wanting to make a suitable impression on the French court to counter her rather short stature and not-too-pretty countenance, the youthful Catherine de’Medici consulted a Florentine artisan who presented her with the very first example of a pair of modern high-heeled shoes, which caused quite a stir when she arrived. Immediately disliked by the French, she nonetheless became their queen when the eldest son of Francis I died, leaving the throne to her husband, Henry of Orléans, who was crowned as Henry II. Henry, meanwhile, had been having a passionate affair with Diane de Poitiers, a ravishingly beautiful courtesan 20 years his senior. But in spite of this, Catherine de’Medici bore him no less than ten children; three died at birth; three others were destined to become kings of France: Francis II, Charles IX and Henry III.
Henry II’s hatred for the Protestant Huguenots of France and the violent repression that he imposed on them, finally led to an all out civil war. He was to die from a horrible jousting accident in 1559. It was then that Catherine de’Medici started a long reign of co-regency with her sons; first with Francis II, who died a year later in 1560, then with her second son Charles IX, who died in 1574, and finally with Henry III who died in August 1589, just a few months after Catherine's own death in January of that same year.
At first Catherine had oscillated between Huguenots and Catholics in an attempt to bring peace to France, and she even went as far as to arrange a marriage between her daughter, Marguerite, and Henry of Navarre, the dashing Protestant Bourbon prince, the future Henry IV of France. The kingdom of Navarre, which was situated in northern Spain, was ruled by a rogue French dynasty, the Bourbons, who bitterly opposed the Catholic League. Henry's mother, Jeanne d’Albret, the queen of Navarre, was a staunch Protestant and saw to it that her son also followed suit. Trained in military skills by Gaspard de Coligny, an able Protestant general of Navarre, Henry of Navarre proved to be a natural military strategist who excelled at hand-to-hand combat, starting at the young age of 16 when he personally led the first cavalry charge of the Huguenots against the Catholics at the Battle of Arnay-le-duc. Finally, in 1570, a precarious peace treaty was signed by Catherine de’Medici, queen of France, and Jeanne d’Albret, queen of Navarre, and a marriage was proposed between Catherine's daughter, Marguerite de’Medici, and Jeanne's heroic son, Henry of Navarre. After lengthy negotiations between the two rival queens, an agreement was reached in 1572 and the marriage ceremony was planned to take place in Paris. Upon arrival in Paris in June, however, the queen of Navarre suddenly died of a lung infection and, in consequence, her son Henry became the new king of Navarre. He and Marguerite de’Medici married on 18 August 1572 but Henry refused to attend Catholic Mass after the wedding with the French royal family. And barely a few days later, one of history's most gruesome ‘days of infamy’ was to crush all hopes of peace between the Protestant Huguenots and the Catholics in France.
The St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre
During the royal wedding of Henry and Marguerite, thousands of Huguenots, including Henry's famous cousin, the Prince of Condé, had poured into Paris for the celebrations. Rumours began to spread of a plot against Catherine de’Medici, who urged her frail and weak-minded son, Charles IX, to act swiftly and harshly against the Huguenots. There followed an attempt to assassinate the Prince of Condé which sparked a huge riot against Catherine; in return the royal guards were ordered to attack the unprepared Huguenots. A terrible massacre ensued, and the streets of Paris, it was later said, were knee-deep in blood. This gruesome genocide has gone down in history as the ‘St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre’ because it took place on 24 August, the festival of that saint.
Against the background of such charged events, Henry of Navarre found himself effectively a prisoner of the most Catholic French royal family into which he had married. In a bid to save his own life as well as the Protestant cause, he pretended to abandon Protestantism. After convincing the crafty Catherine de’Medici that he had sincerely converted to Catholicism, Henry finally escaped three years later to his kingdom in Navarre to raise an army against the Catholics.
Meanwhile Charles IX died and was succeeded by Henry III, Catherine's last and favourite son. Aloof and apparently fond of young men known as the mignons, a quaint French word for homosexuals, Henry III spent much of his time in questionable pastimes which included dressing up as a woman, taking part in macabre processions around Paris wearing a sinister monk's cloak and cagoul, and joining a group of Capuchin friars who impersonated the ‘Virgin Mary’ and ‘Maria Magdalena’ while a third, perhaps the king himself, impersonated ‘Jesus’.1 Additionally Henry was the patron of two religious military orders – the ‘Knights of the Holy Spirit’ and ‘Knights of the Phoenix’ – which were reported to have conducted unusual rituals involving the king.2
With no marriage or heirs in sight, Henry III seemed destined to be the last of the powerful Orléans-Medici dynasty to rule France. Attention fell on his dashing renegade brother-in-law, Henry of Navarre who was the next in line to the throne of France. And many began to see in him the god-sent king who would unite Protestants and Catholics once again.
A Mass for Paris
In 1586 Henry of Navarre set up his military headquarters at La Rochelle, traditionally a strong fortress city and symbol of Protestant resistance. From there he would oppose the powerful Catholic League formed by an unholy alliance of Spain, France, the Vatican and the Hapsburgs in Germany, the latter the traditional seat of the Holy Roman Empire. In the fall of 1587, Henry of Navarre confronted the Catholic army of Henry III of France at Coutras, near Bordeaux. Henry III’s army was led by one of Henry III’s mignons, the Duke of Joyeuse, who was no match for Henry of Navarre. The Catholics were crushed and the Duke of Joyeuse was killed in action.
Not unexpectedly, Henry of Navarre was immediately condemned as a heretic by the pope and declared unfit to succeed to the throne of France. Philip II of Spain, unquestionably the real power behind the Catholic League, then proposed that his daughter, Isabella, should become queen of France. Bullied by the immensely powerful Count of Guise, a staunch Catholic, Henry III fled Paris, and the Catholic League took over.
Henry III struck a secret deal with Henry of Navarre and promised him the succes
sion to the throne if he would help him recapture Paris. The next move was the assassination of the Count of Guise by Henry III’s mignons on 23 December 1588. He and Henry of Navarre then laid siege to Paris in early 1589. In the midst of this crisis, however, Henry III was himself knifed by a fanatical Jesuit monk, Jacques Clément. On his deathbed, coughing blood from his lung wounds, Henry apparently managed to master enough strength to proclaim Henry of Navarre his legitimate successor.
The Catholic League refused Henry of Navarre entry into Paris and the crown of France unless he would attend a Catholic Mass. It was then that Henry immortalised the phrase, ‘Paris is well worth a Mass!’ and once again abjured Protestantism in the name of expediency. Henry of Navarre was crowned King Henry IV of France at Chartres Cathedral in 1594 and, on 22 March, the spring equinox, rode into Paris on his celebrated white steed amid huge cheers and jubilations.
The Hermetic mission of Giordano Bruno
It will be clear from the brief sketch given above that the religious struggle which most concerned the Catholic Church during the 16th century was its fight against Protestantism. The Cathar wars were a thing of the past, dualist heresy was dead and buried, and although the Protestants were ‘heretics’ they were nothing like as heretical as the Cathars had been 400 years before. Indeed, apart from a shared anti-materialism, the Cathar religion had no more in common with Protestantism than it did with Catholicism and belonged, as we have seen, to the tradition of Gnostic Christianity that took shape in Alexandria in the first three centuries AD.
Out of the same Alexandrian melting-pot, in the same period, emerged a second tradition that also claimed to pass on a sacred soul-freeing gnosis. We've seen in previous chapters that the name of this second tradition was Hermeticism – after Hermes Trismegistus – and that the Church regarded it as ‘pagan’ rather than Christian. Unlike the Gnostic tradition, which we suggest survived in a virtually unbroken chain of heresy from the early Christian period until the crushing of the Cathars, the continued survival of Hermeticism from the 5th to the 15th centuries is much harder to attest.3 What brings this ancient tradition to life again, at least in the West, seems purely and simply to be the recovery of its primary texts, their translation at the Medici Academy in the 1460s, and the subsequent international ‘movement’ that the texts inspired. It may be the case, however, that there was more than immediately meets the eye to the phenomenal success of this revived Hermeticism. The sheer speed with which it took off and the way in which it so rapidly managed to work its way into the heart of the Vatican, as we reported in Chapter Eight, are hard to explain. It is almost as though some sort of system or ‘organisation’ was already in place when the texts resurfaced that had both the will and the capacity to exploit their full potential for undermining the established Church.
If so Giordano Bruno, perhaps the greatest Hermetic magus of the 16th century, is likely to have been part of the plot (though he may have possibly have been too stubborn and independent a thinker to have plotted efficiently!). Born in 1548 at the little town of Nola near Naples he was burnt agonisingly to death over a slow fire by the Inquisition in 1600 for having spent the previous 21 years trying to destroy Catholic Christianity …
The reader will recall that the majority of papal inquisitors were Dominicans. Ironically, as a young man, Bruno himself had been a Dominican monk, at their monastery in Naples. It was a foretaste of what was to come that even at this early stage he was accused of heresy by his fellow monks. His crime was to have been caught reading the banned works of Erasmus and those of Marcilio Ficino and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola expounding the Hermetic tradition.
Bruno's stubborn attitude and fierce free will were not assets for the controlled life at the monastery. In 1576, when he was 28 years old, he finally ended up repudiating this oppressive religious order and emotionally defrocked himself in public. Learning that the Inquisition was preparing an indictment against him (which consisted of no less than 130 separate charges of heresy!) he then wisely went on the run.4
Impulsive, argumentative, brilliant – indeed a genius – Bruno was an all-out Hermetist who harboured wild dreams of the full restoration of the ‘Egyptian’ religion of Hermes Trismegistus. But unlike Pico della Mirandola's rather feeble attempt to integrate Hermeticism with Christianity through the Cabala (see Chapter Eight) Bruno had something much more radical in mind: the actual replacement of Christianity by the Hermetic magical religion of Egypt.
Bruno's travels
After fleeing the Inquisition in 1576 Bruno turned up in quick succession in Genoa, Turin, Savona and Noli. In 1577 he spent a few weeks in Venice where he published his first book, unfortunately now lost, under the title Dei segni dei tempi (‘Signs of the Times’). His next stop was Padua and after that Milan where he first heard of an English nobleman, Sir Philip Sydney, who would later come to play an important role in his life.5
In 1578 Bruno travelled to Geneva, where he hoped to win the protection of the Marquis of Vico, a wealthy and influential Italian Protestant living in exile. Bruno made it clear that he did not want to adopt Protestantism himself, only to live and work quietly, but the authorities would not permit him to do so. He fell into a slanging-match with an eminent professor of Geneva, was arrested for his temerity and forced to apologise. Soon afterwards he left the city in disgust.6
From 1579 – 1581 Bruno lived in Toulouse, capital of the former Cathar domain of Occitania and now fully integrated into France. He took his doctorate in theology at the University of Toulouse and was subsequently appointed to a chair in philosophy there. Once again, however, his instinctive nonconformism and outspokenness led him into conflicts with other scholars and with his students.7
In 1581 Bruno sought refuge in Paris where he delivered a series of 30 lectures that were reportedly widely admired. He quickly began to acquire a reputation for his ‘enormous erudition, prodigious memory, and eloquence.’8
Bruno at the French court
In 1582 Bruno was summoned to the French court by the slightly unhinged Henry III who was then at the apogee of his doomed reign. Bruno, it seems, was at first very well received by the king, and in due course was given a position at the Collège de France to teach the art of memory and mnemonics.9 In Bruno's own words: I gained such a name that King Henry III summoned me one day and asked me whether the memory which I had and which I taught was a natural memory or obtained by magic art; I proved to him that it was not obtained by magic art but by science. After that I printed a book on memory entitled De Umbris Idearum [‘The Shadow of Ideas’] which I dedicated to his majesty, whereupon he made me an endowed reader.10
That the art of memory had nothing to do with magic is, strictly speaking, not true; and Bruno knew this.11 But he made the statement quoted above during his trial by the Inquisition in 1600, and thus would have been most reluctant to admit to using pagan magic in his teachings. Nevertheless the cultivation of a powerful memory, and more specifically the kind of super-memory that Bruno had mastered through the art of mnemonics, was indeed very much part of the system of magic that was once practiced by the ancient Egyptians and divulged in the Hermetic writings. As Frances Yates comments: Bruno's relations with Henry III are only documented from what Bruno himself told the Inquisitors … If Henry looked at the De Umbris Idearum [the book Bruno dedicated to him] he would certainly have recognised its magic images … at one time the king sent to Spain for magic books … one of which was the Picatrix. It is also incredible in view of his mother's addiction to magicians and astrologers [Catherine had, after all, been a member of the Medici elite in Florence], that Henry should not have known a good deal about magic. The more probable version of the story would be that Henry was attracted by the rumour about magic in connection with Bruno, and this was why he sent for him.12
Images, especially images of stars and other celestial objects such as the Sun, planets and the zodiac, in short all the symbols of astral magic found in the Hermetica's Asclepius and in the Picatrix (see discu
ssion in Chapter Eight), were indeed used by Bruno as powerful memory devices. To speak more technically, they served for him as ‘talismans’ by means of which memories could be permanently imprinted on the mind.13 Also incorporated into Bruno's magical art of memory was to be found the new and still very controversial theory of the great astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus with its Sun-centred/heliocentric dynamics so abhorred by the Catholic Church at the time. Bruno, in fact, saw himself as a disciple of Copernicus; but being Bruno, he wanted to go even further than the shy Polish man by boldly proclaiming that the universe was infinite and made up of infinite number of suns, i.e. the stars, each having planetary systems populated by living creatures just like our own planet. And thus Bruno, through his remarkable intuition, can be said to have anticipated by nearly four centuries our modern ideas of the cosmos.14
Copernicus's theory, by correctly placing the Sun rather than the Earth at the centre of our own planetary system was understood by Bruno as evidence of divine harmony and universal unity, in which all the planets were governed by a central authority. Seen through the complex and symbolically-inclined mind of Bruno, the heliocentric system, brought down to earth by the power of astral magic, provided the model for the ideal society. Such a society would of course be ruled by a great ‘solar monarch’, advised by philosopher-priests, whose reign would usher in the magical Hermetic religion around which all the nations of the world would unite. To Bruno's way of thinking the French, or perhaps even the English in the person of their illustrious Queen Elizabeth I, might prove to be the source of such a benign and charismatic ruler.
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