He resolved to settle down and put his efforts into composing a book that he had in mind, and to present it, accompanied by the proper recommendations, to the pope; and to obtain from him a pardon for what he had expressed to quiet his conscience, and, finally, the ability to live in Rome, and devote himself to writing and show his abilities and perhaps to obtain a lecture or two.
Fra Domenico also noted, pointedly, that Bruno had always lived “in a Catholic manner.”
In his own testimony, Bruno supplied the name of this prospective book: On the Seven Liberal Arts. With its help, as he would eventually tell his inquisitors, he hoped to capture the pontiff’s attention both for the Nolan philosophy and for his own situation:
I was going to go to Frankfurt again, leaving here, to print some of my other works, and one in particular, On the Seven Liberal Arts, with the idea of taking these and some of my other printed works that I approve of (because there are some I don’t approve of), and go to present them at the feet of His Beatitude, as I understand that he loves people of talent, and explain my situation to him, and try to obtain absolution from my excesses and the right to wear a clerical habit, but live outside the convent.
He had already used the theme of the seven liberal arts in his farewell address to the University of Wittenberg, expounding on the different ways in which these disciplines, and the university itself, provided a home for wisdom. Perhaps he intended to develop a similar picture of Clement’s pontificate, launching barbs against Protestant intolerance rather than “the perverse tyranny of the pope” (as he had in Helmstedt). We will probably never know, because the Nolan’s plans to leave again for Frankfurt aroused deep suspicions in his Venetian host, Giovanni Mocenigo.
As Bruno’s works on memory insist from the beginning to the end of his career, the art was not an easy one to master. It took constant application to learn it and constant exercise to preserve it. A Venetian patrician like Mocenigo had many other demands on his time and concentration, and nothing in Mocenigo’s subsequent history suggests that he was either outstandingly bright or outstandingly disciplined in the first place. After seven or eight months, he began to feel that Bruno was cheating him, taking his money and accepting his hospitality while holding back the real secrets of the art. They had begun to get on each other’s nerves, not least, Mocenigo family tradition suggests, because Bruno was all too attentive to Mocenigo’s wife.
Bruno himself recounts what happened next:
It seems to me that I had done enough and taught him what I should on the basis of what he had asked me, and therefore I planned to return to Frankfurt to publish certain works of mine, and on Thursday last I asked his permission to leave. And he, hearing this, and suspecting that I really intended to leave his house to teach the same arts that I have taught him, and more, rather than go to Frankfurt as I said, he pressed me to stay, and when I continued to insist that I wanted to leave, first he began to complain that I had never taught him as much as I had promised, and then he threatened me by telling me that if I did not stay with him of my own free will, he would find a way to make me stay. And the next night, which was Friday, when Signor Giovanni saw that I was still resolved to leave, and that I had already packed my things and arranged to ship them to Frankfurt, he came to see me when I was in bed, with the excuse that he wanted to talk to me, and once he had entered, his servant, named Bortolo, joined him, along with five or six others; I think they were some of the gondoliers who are stationed nearby. And they lifted me out of my bed and carried me up to an attic, and locked me in that attic, while Signor Giovanni told me that if I wanted to stay and teach him the terms for memorizing words, and the terms for geometry, as he had asked earlier, then he would let me out, but otherwise something unpleasant would happen to me. And I replied that I had taught him enough and more than I was obliged to, and that I did not deserve to be treated like this. He left me until the next day, when a captain came with certain men I didn’t recognize, and they took me with them to the ground floor of the house, to a storeroom, where they left me until nightfall, and then another captain came with his assistants, and they took me to the prisons of this Holy Office, where I believe I have been brought by the efforts of Signor Giovanni, who, offended by what I have already said, I believe may have reported something about me.
Bruno was right. On May 23, 1592, as Giordano Bruno sat locked in one of his storerooms, Giovanni Mocenigo first went to his confessor, and then drafted a letter to the Inquisition in his large, assertive handwriting, trembling with an anger that sometimes made him press his pen into the paper with particular fury:
I, Zuane Mocenigo, report by obligation of my conscience and order of my confessor that I have heard Giordano Bruno of Nola say, while conversing in my home: that it is a great blasphemy for Catholics to say that bread transmutes into flesh, that he is an enemy to the Mass, that no religion pleases him, that Christ was a wretch, and that if he did such wretched work as deluding the people, he could easily have predicted that he would be hanged, that God has no distinction of persons, as this would constitute an imperfection in God, that the world is eternal and that there are infinite worlds, because he says that he wants to do what he is able to do, that Christ performed apparent miracles and was a magician, and likewise the apostles, and he had a mind to do as much as they and more, that Christ showed reluctance to die, and fled death as long as he could, that there is no punishment of sins, and that the souls created by nature pass from one animal, and that just as brute animals are born by spontaneous generation, so are human beings when they are born again after a flood. He revealed plans to make himself the head of a new sect under the name of a new philosophy, he said that the Virgin could not have given birth, that our Catholic faith is full of blasphemies against God, that friars should have neither the right to debate nor incomes, because they pollute the world and are all asses, that our opinions are the teaching of asses, that we have no proof that our faith finds merit with God, and that to lead a good life it is enough to do to others as we would have them do to us, and that he laughs at all the other sins, and he marvels that God can bear such heresies from Catholics. He says he wants to tend to the art of divination, and draw the whole world behind him, that Saint Thomas and all the doctors of the Church know nothing in comparison with him, and he would so enlighten all the best theologians in the world that they would have not a word to say to him … And I reverently kiss the hands of your Reverend Paternity. At home, May 23, 1592
The accusations go on for three pages. Two days later, when Bruno was already in custody, Mocenigo wrote a second letter:
On that day, when I kept Iordano Bruno under lock and key … he told me that he didn’t fear the Inquisition, because he offended no one living as he did, and he never remembered saying anything bad to me … And because you have done me a great favor by pardoning the lateness of my accusation, I beg you to excuse it also among those most illustrious lords [of the Inquisition] with every respect for my good intentions and because it was impossible for me to bring up everything at one moment, except for the fact that I had no idea of the man’s depravity until I hosted him in my house, which I did for perhaps two months, because after he came here [to Venice] he was partly in rented rooms and partly in Padua … and I had always promised to myself that I would turn him in for the censure of this Holy Office.
The trip from the Palazzo Mocenigo to the Inquisition was not a short one, and it must have been made in a gondola. Since 1560, the Dominican complex of San Domenico di Castello had served the Venetian Inquisition as tribunal and prison. The fourteenth-century Gothic church and its adjoining convent stood on the other end of the city from the Palazzo Mocenigo, just south of the great Venetian Arsenal, where the city’s fleets were built, outfitted, and maintained by one of the most efficient industrial operations in the world. The Dominican outpost was remodeled in the sixteenth century for its new purpose, but we can see nothing of those remodelings now: church and convent were razed in 1807 by order of Napo
leon, who claimed the land for a public garden. By 1812, the canal that flanked San Domenico had been filled to become a promenade, and every trace of the building had been scraped away. On that occasion, at least, the Venetians obeyed Napoleon’s orders with a speed worthy of the Arsenal workers, as eager to erase the memory of the Holy Office as their Corsican overlord. The former site of San Domenico di Castello is now dedicated to the memory of Giuseppe Garibaldi, who fought so fiercely to free Italy from the temporal dominion of the Church. On a nearby building, a marble relief in Gothic style of the saints Dominic, John the Baptist, and Peter Martyr beneath a blessing Christ is the only surviving reminder of what once stood on this ground.
Venice called itself the Serenissima Repubblica, the “Most Serene Republic.” “Serene,” as the pedant Manfurio had pointed out in Bruno’s Candlemaker, was an adjective appropriate only for the heavens; in effect, therefore, serene Venice was a heaven on earth (the seas over which it ruled, as Manfurio noted, had only the right to be termed “calm”). Venetian serenity was famously enforced by the rule of law, spectacularly in the pageantry of its government, cruelly in the New Prisons that adjoined the Doge’s Palace. Violent criminals, murderers, thieves, and sexual offenders had the worst of it, thrust into windowless cells along the waterline, some in solitary confinement, some in utter darkness, crawling through the low entrances until they felt the slam of the ironclad wooden door behind them.
The Inquisition’s prisoners, who posed less of an immediate physical threat and often came from a higher social stratum, were kept in greater comfort at San Domenico. They had windows to waft away at least some of the stench of seldom-washed bodies, unwashed clothing, slop buckets, and food. But they were crowded into close quarters as they waited for their hearings. And for those who ran afoul of the Venetian Republic, its rule of law did nothing to comfort their madness, heal their tortures, or soften the cruel pageantry of their punishments.
Giordano Bruno’s case is one of thirty-five preserved in the same file of the Venetian State Archive, and the nineteenth to come before the Inquisition in the year 1592. By the beginning of December the cases would number seventy-two. The old records are spotty: about half the cases from 1592 still survive; none are preserved from 1593, a handful from 1594. Yet these cases, when taken together, provide a powerful image of the insecurities that plagued Venetian society near the end of the sixteenth century. Most of the accused were literate, workers or professionals, but not noble: in part because Venetian aristocrats protected one another, but also for purely statistical reasons—most Venetians belonged to the working or merchant class.
In their investigations, the inquisitors obeyed strict rules of due process; unless two witnesses backed up an accusation, there was no case. Furthermore, unlike its counterparts in Rome and Naples, the Venetian Holy Office tended, with a few important exceptions, to leave people alone. In 1592, seven people lodged accusations of witchcraft or fortune-telling by “throwing the beans” (buttare la fava), against women: Caterina Moretta, Virginia Greca, Lucrezia Baglioni, Paulina Bianchini, Cathe Zaratina “the Slav” (“Schiavona”), Clara who has no surname, and a whole list submitted by one informer in November. The inquisitors ignored every one of these denunciations. Typically, the accused witches were poor and often illiterate, whereas the men accused of sorcery in the same year were all well educated: the Neapolitan schoolmaster Maximiliano Visconti, accused of necromancy, turned out to have read extensively about astrology, but owned no texts listed on the Index of Forbidden Books; neither had a whole set of Capuchin friars who were denounced by a neighbor “to unburden his conscience.”
On the other hand, although conviction was impossible on the basis of a single witness, there was no law against preventive detention, as Bruno discovered when Giovanni Mocenigo handed him over to the inquisitors’ police. The Franciscan friar Agostino Altomonte spent several months of 1592 and 1593 in prison, after a series of women denounced his sexual assaults. His actions, however unsavory, did not qualify as heresy—indeed his brothers in the convent reported that he lived an exemplary Christian life—and eventually the inquisitors were compelled to absolve him, but only after dragging out his captivity and postponing his verdict as long as they could, the one punishment they could inflict on an obviously reprehensible character. They were equally powerless to help Zuane Zaratan’s wife when she denounced him for bigamy: Zuane had run off to live with his new wife long before. The fact that Antonio Benzon had eaten cheese with his bread and water in prison seems to have disturbed neither Antonio himself nor his examiners.
With the Ottoman Empire just across the Adriatic, Venice had become a sanctuary for fugitive Christian slaves; Florentia Podocathara, Demetrio Lecca Bagga, Luigi Hernandez, Zorzi Armeno, and Ser Natalino da Perasto, each bought by Turkish slavers and forced to convert to Islam, asked to be reinstated as practicing Christians. Each one recounted a terrifying story to the inquisitors: Florentia had borne three children to her Turkish master, gently promoted to her “husband” in her testimony, and fled after his death to avoid a second “marriage.” Demetrio was sold in Albania at the age of twelve to be brought up as a Janissary, the crack imperial troop made up entirely of converted Christians; at twenty-two, he had already entered a high level of the Turkish civil service in Greece before escaping to Venice by way of Kephallonia. Each of these former slaves was received immediately back into the Church.
The harshness of Venetian rhetoric about “damned Muslims” and the republic’s incessant evocations of its victory over the Turks in the Battle of Lepanto played out more leniently in daily life: thus the fact that Battista Brezula had a Turkish wife impressed the inquisitors no more unfavorably in 1591 than it had in 1584; in each instance a single person had informed on him, not enough to make a case. Neither did the Holy Office seem to care much about foreigners whose suspicious neighbors denounced them: they saw no problem with Antoine Noner, denounced as a Huguenot; or the Portuguese convert Antonio Diez, said to have reverted to Judaism; or the alleged Protestant Jacob of Flanders, who sold pewter spoons and, it soon transpired, regularly went to Mass and confession at the huge Dominican church of San Zanipolo, where he may have seen Giordano Bruno mingling with the crowd.
The Holy Office in Venice had only two real concerns: publishing and heresy. No printer in the city was authorized to publish without a license from the inquisitors. This procedure worked two ways: it provided a rudimentary sort of copyright protection, but it also subjected authors and printers to censorship, the most lenient form of censorship to be found in Italy, but censorship nonetheless. This censorship was intimately linked with the Inquisition’s chief fear: heresy, or, as they put it, “heretical depravity.”
Nine accusations of heresy survive from 1592, including Bruno’s, in the Venetian archive’s file of thirty-five. These proceedings show that Venice was an emporium for exchanging ideas as much as silks and spices, and it was this traffic, a traffic of books as well as conversations and sermons, that the Holy Office tried to control.
The files show just how actively people discussed religion, and how little guidance the Church provided for any such discussion. Workmen argued in their shops, around the well, or in the tavern; their better-educated neighbors congregated in bookshops. The highest level of society met in noble palazzi, like the group that gathered in the house of Andrea Morosini and included both Giordano Bruno and his accuser, Giovanni Mocenigo. In 1592, with striking regularity, the first witnesses brought in for the Inquisition’s nine cases of heresy were booksellers and Dominican priests from San Zanipolo. Both groups responded to the inquisitors’ questions with studied evasiveness. The booksellers’ attitude is easy to explain: the Inquisition did nothing but interfere with their lucrative business. If its interference mattered less in Venice than elsewhere in Italy, the lack of a Holy Office in the Protestant world meant that northern Europeans were coming to dominate the printing industry, and Venetian printers could see this domination on display twice a year at the
Frankfurt book fair.
As for the Dominican friars from San Zanipolo, they represented the most authoritative Dominican community in Venice. The Inquisition’s headquarters at San Domenico di Castello served the workers at the Arsenal, whereas San Zanipolo served generations of doges and aristocrats among more humble Venetians. It is not surprising that the inquisitors would bring these illustrious colleagues in to testify, and when they did, it was usually to exonerate the accused. Most cases brought before the Holy Office in Venice seem to have ended in acquittal; most people who were finally found guilty of unorthodox beliefs were assigned a regimen of devotions like daily prayer and abstinence from meat on Fridays and Saturdays, and set free to resume their normal lives. The five people who sometimes crowded with Giordano Bruno in the Inquisition’s jail cell at San Domenico were the exceptions to this comparatively lenient rule, and it is no wonder that they got on one another’s nerves as violently as they did. With a workload that averaged fewer than a hundred cases a year, most of them inconclusive, the Venetian Inquisition could never have entertained many prisoners at one time, and they were never entertained for long. The prisoners who belonged to religious orders were usually punished by being sent out to a house in the provinces, far from the temptations of Venice: a sentence to life imprisonment that could eventually be commuted by good behavior. Insanity was handled in the same way: the prisoner/patient was institutionalized in some remote religious community. Giordano Bruno’s cellmates included one such madman, Fra Celestino Arrigoni da Verona, whose trial records, like those of his other cellmates, do not seem to have survived in Venice.
The ideas that brought nine people to the attention of the Inquisition in 1592 show surprising similarities, and show them at every social level. Giordano Bruno expresses these ideas in their most sophisticated form, but he clearly represents a refined version of some fairly common beliefs. The evident wealth and equally evident corruption of the Church hierarchy had spurred insistent reform movements since the rise of the Franciscan Order in the eleventh century and the Dominicans in the twelfth. In the sixteenth century, the Reformation had brought about trenchant changes in the way Christians regarded their religion, with Protestants insisting on a vernacular liturgy and a vernacular Bible, opening service and Scripture alike to the public at large.
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