CHAPTER TWO

The Death of Little Simon and the Trial of Jews in Trent

DURING THE CHRISTIAN HOLY WEEK of 1475, which started with Palm Sunday on March 19 and ended on Easter Sunday, March 26, rumors began circulating in Trent, a city at the foothills of the Alps, that Jews had killed a toddler named Simon. The boy disappeared on Thursday, March 23, while the tiny Jewish community of Trent was celebrating Passover, which had begun the evening before. Simon’s body was discovered on Easter Sunday in a canal running under the house owned by a Jewish family. His death unleashed a chain of events that resulted in the destruction of Trent’s tiny Jewish community and the creation of a cult of Little Simon, or Simonino as he would be called in Trent, with the relics of the boy’s body at its center. But the impact of the events extended beyond Trent: they revealed fissures between German and Italian political and legal cultures and between the political and religious influence of the pope; in the long term, they also undermined centuries of papal policies and protection of Jews, effecting a policy transformation with ramifications extending beyond well into the twentieth century. Until the 1475 events in Trent, the medieval papal policy of condemning the persecution of Jews resulting from blood accusations had remained unchallenged. In fact, copies of the bulls by Innocent IV from 1247 and Gregory X from 1272 on behalf of Jews facing similar accusations are preserved in Trent among the massive amount of documents related to the affair.¹

The story of Simon of Trent is probably one of the best-documented blood accusations, archivally and iconographically, with thousands of documents and hundreds of pieces of art, printed broadsheets, pamphlets, and books preserved in Trent, the Vatican, and other European archives (Fig. 2.1). Because of this volume of material, which allows scholars to mine it from different angles and approaches, it is also the most-studied blood accusation in premodern European history.² Yet, despite the unprecedented amount of historical evidence, we know relatively little about what happened in Trent in the spring of 1475 and the following months. And what is known comes primarily from sources created or preserved by Bishop Johannes Hinderbach, a preeminent player in the affair. Hinderbach and his allies shaped the public memory of Simon’s death and the trial that ensued; they also shaped the historical records on which later scholars have relied. The records of the trial of Jews in Trent demonstrate, to use Jennifer Bishop’s words, “the ‘creative’ nature of documentary records” that are “manipulated to serve particular ends.”³ The thousands of documents left by Hinderbach and his network of supporters reflect the extent to which they sought very self-consciously to promote their version of the story while suppressing or discrediting others. In fact, a close reading of the documents shows that the trial of Trent, the most notorious blood accusation in premodern European history, was also a fight over records and memory.⁴

That fight mattered. Bishop Hinderbach, who had a deep interest in saints and relics and had earlier been involved in a canonization process, knew how to fashion evidence used in assuring a saint’s recognition.⁵ He may have been surprised by the pushback he received in 1475 from Rome and elsewhere, but his knowledge of the canonization process played an important role in shaping the records of the trial, as well as the facts on the ground through the iconographic representations of Simon. Hinderbach understood that the validity of the cult of Little Simon was dependent on the validity of the trial proceedings and of the testimonies extracted there. Simon was a martyr only if it could be proven that Jews killed him. Ultimately, Hinderbach was correct; the records and the existing cult would become the foundation for a shift in papal policy of protecting Jews against blood accusations and for the official recognition of the cult of Simon. But Hinderbach would not live to see these results.

Records are not independent of power, and in Trent—a liminal place nestled between the spheres of influence of the Holy Roman Empire and the Italian princes and rulers, between the emperor and the pope, and between German and Italian cultures—the clash over records was also a clash over influence and power. Trent was part of the Holy Roman Empire, subject to the rule of both the emperor and the duke of Tyrol, the latter residing in Innsbruck. In the fifteenth century, a complex relationship between the city of Trent and the duke of Tyrol was articulated in several agreements, according to which the bishop of Trent, a prince-bishop with governing powers, recognized the duke of Austria, who was then also a ruler of Tyrol, as his overlord (unser gnediger herr), promised loyalty, allowed the duke access to all castles and fortresses, and acknowledged the duke’s right to appoint a city captain, who was to assist the bishop in secular matters.⁶ The duke was obliged to defend the bishop and the church of Trent.

FIG. 2.1   German broadsheet showing pilgrims visiting the relics of Simon, in a position known as victima. Bound with the account of Matthia Tiberino. Bayerische StaatsBibliothek, Rar. 338.

There was a personal element to Hinderbach’s involvement as well. For Hinderbach, a German trained in Italy, the trial of the Jews came on the heels of a humiliating confrontation with the pope over his own election as bishop of Trent in August 1465. The pope had preferred an Italian and refused to accept Hinderbach’s election until May 1466, and then only after Emperor Frederick III intervened.⁷ The Trent trial, and especially the resulting clash with Rome, must have stirred up painful memories and raised questions of the legitimacy of Hinderbach’s authority as bishop, similar to those that had surfaced in the aftermath of his election as bishop of Trent. The trial of the Jews, though grounded in Christian anti-Jewish attitudes and beliefs, was thus about much more than Jews.

What Is Known—The Bare Facts of the First Days

After a toddler named Simon disappeared on the evening of Maundy Thursday, March 23, 1475, and the search by family and neighbors brought no results, his father reported his son’s disappearance the next morning, Good Friday, to Bishop Hinderbach, fearing the boy may have drowned in a nearby canal.⁸ The bishop ordered Giovanni de Salis, the podestà or chief magistrate, to coordinate the search. Rumors began circulating that Jews may have kidnapped the boy because, during that season, it was said, they “capture Christian children and kill them.”⁹ That same day, a city official named Dainessius was ordered to go with a notary to the house of Samuel, a prominent member of Trent’s tiny Jewish community, and search for the boy. After searching Samuel’s house in many places, the officials left empty-handed.

On the evening of Easter Sunday, March 26, a Jewish servant found the boy’s body immersed in a canal running under Samuel’s house. Jews immediately reported their discovery to the authorities, who performed a preliminary autopsy on the spot and ordered Simon’s body moved to a hospital in the German Church of St. Peter’s in Trent to be reexamined the next day.¹⁰ Eight Jews were immediately arrested, among them the heads of the three Jewish families living in Trent: Samuel, Israel, and Tobias. The day after the autopsy, additional Jews were arrested, including visitors to Trent and servants in the existing Jewish households, along with Samuel’s wife Brunetta, the only woman among the arrested. On March 31, the notarized recording of “miracles” allegedly performed by Simon began, and no time was wasted before the first narrative of the murder was composed.¹¹ On April 4, not even two weeks after the boy’s disappearance, Giovanni Mattia Tiberino (Johannes Matthias Tiberinus), a physician at the court of Bishop Johannes Hinderbach of Trent, who had on March 27 examined the boy’s body along with other physicians, issued a short address in Latin to the Senate of Brescia, his town of origin, reporting the story of Simon’s death. Tiberino sent a copy also to Rafaele Zovenzoni, a poet from Bishop Hinderbach’s circle who would play an important role in promoting the cult of Simon of Trent.¹² Tiberino’s address, soon printed as short pamphlets in Italian, Latin, and German, would become the dominant version of the story.¹³ But Tiberino’s account was written many months before the trial ended and, more ominously, even before the first confessions were extracted under torture from the accused Jews. And yet, it was that early version, along with its follow-up updated on April 17, which would remain the primary voice about the Trent affair for centuries.

Tiberino’s Narrative

Addressing the Senate of Brescia on April 4, 1475, Tiberino promised to write “about a most important event, such as no era—from the Lord’s passion up to these times—has ever heard of”: a horrible crime, perpetrated by Jews.¹⁴ He wished to spread the word, so that Jews “may be eliminated from the whole Christian world” and the memory of them “utterly vanish from the land of the living.” Jews, Tiberino wrote, not only “devour” Christian property through usury but also “feast on the living blood of our sons, afflicting them with terrible punishment in their synagogues, and cruelly slaughtering them in place of Christ.”¹⁵ Shifting attention to Trent, Tiberino introduced “three families of Jews headed by Tobias, Engel, and Samuel” and began to describe their “horrible crime.”

Everything, according to Tiberino, began on March 21 with a gathering in the synagogue at Samuel’s house, “during what the Christians call Holy Week.” At that meeting, Engel said, “On this Day of Preparation, we have plenty of meat and fish. We lack only one thing.”¹⁶ Samuel asked, “What are you without?” and all understood that Engel meant a Christian child to serve as a sacrifice killed “in contempt of our lord Jesus Christ,” with his “gore” used “in their unleavened loaves” so it may prevent “the powerful stench they exude.”¹⁷ According to Tiberino, they called “this their Iobel, that is Jubilee.”

After much back and forth, it was decided that the deed was to take place in Samuel’s house, and Tobias was given the task of finding a child.¹⁸ He initially declined, saying he was “poor … and had small sons,” but others “coerced him with their curses.” On Thursday night (March 23), Tobias went around the town and found Simon, a “handsome,” “pretty,” “kindly and compliant” boy, nearby. Tobias, “the betrayer,” quickly grabbed Simon’s “beautiful hand with his own rabid right hand,” and when Simon began crying, he offered the boy “a silver coin” and “silenced him with coaxing talk”; he then took the child to Samuel’s house. There, Samuel awaited “like a tiger eager for blood” and brought the boy inside where the rest of the Jews “howled over Christian blood.” Tiberino then described, in gratuitously gross detail, Simon’s supposedly torturous death; his circumcision by Moses, who “unsheathing a knife, pierced the infant’s penis, and [then] seizing pincers began to tear apart his right jaw next to the chin, and placed the severed piece of flesh in a bowl that was there ready.” Thereupon the Jews were able to collect the boy’s “sacred blood.” “Anyone who wished,” Tiberino continued, “proceeded to cut out for himself a little bit of living flesh. All the main participants did this.” If the boy made any noise, he was gagged and smothered. “After all this, Moses speedily lifted the infant’s right shin and placing it on his lap, set about similarly ripping open with the same knife the outer portion of flesh lying between the tiny penis and the leg muscle, and, taking up the pincers again, proceeded to rend the living flesh with its living blood.” The whole event ended with the symbolic crucifixion of “half-dead” Simon, with his “most holy arms” violently stretched “in place of the crucified [Christ],” while other Jews encouraged Samuel and Moses to stab the “holy body” with “hard needles.” At the end, the Jews gathered to curse and blaspheme against Christ, while piercing Simon’s body, muttering, as Tiberino reported, incomprehensible pseudo-Hebrew curses: “tolle yesse mina, elle parachies elle parissen tegmalen,” which he explained meant, “Let us butcher this boy just like Jesus, the Christian’s God, who is nothing. Thus may our enemies be eternally confounded.”¹⁹

Simon was killed, Tiberino claimed, in contempt of “our Lord Jesus Christ” and “to insult the Christian faith”; his killing underscored Jews’ broader contempt for Christianity.²⁰ “By an everlasting statute,” Tiberino wrote, Jews cursed daily against “the divine Eucharist and the Blessed ever Virgin Mary.” Their book, called “the Thalmut,” which they “prefer[ed] to the Books of Moses and the Prophets,” contained blasphemies and tales; for example, that “God studies the Thalmut” and Jesus suffers “mighty torments in Hell.” They cursed Christians in their prayers, Tiberino wrote, “men in Hebrew, women in the language, which they learned from their first years,” and prayed for the destruction of their enemies and for the “uprooting of the wicked Christian kingdom.” This relatively lengthy—for a short pamphlet—discussion of Jewish prayers and blasphemies helped Tiberino “contextualize” the motivations behind the killing of Simon and explain any misfortune afflicting Christians. “No wonder,” he bemoaned as he addressed Christians directly, “if Christ should afflict us with wars, famine, thirst, hail, and frost,” because “we suffer [Christ’s] enemies to rule among us!” We Christians simply “cling on to his perpetual enemies, disdaining the inviolable faith.” But in Trent, this was finally to change, Tiberino concluded, and the Jews, “from elders to minors” now in prison, would not be released without paying “the due penalties” for the crimes they committed.

Tiberino’s provocative rhetoric was peppered with phrases referring to the Jews of Trent as “cruel,” “most rabid,” like “tigers eager for blood,” and “howling with dry throats over Christian blood,” sometimes singling out specific figures such as Moses, or Tobias, or Samuel. In committing these “horrible crimes,” the Jews were juxtaposed to Simon, who was described as “glorious,” “innocent,” and in the German texts also “blessed.”

Tiberino’s violently inflected language and detailed description of Simon’s suffering, written before the first Jews confessed under torture, certainly served to emphasize Jews’ “cruelty” and their hatred of Christianity. His explanation for why Christians “suffer Christ’s eternal enemies” in their midst alluded to Jewish political influence and the economic role they played in Christian society. “Listen, you rulers of peoples, to the unheard-of-crime, and watch over your peoples as faithful shepherds should! Let earth’s denizens awake and see what snakes they are nurturing in their own bosom! The cruel Jews not only eat up Christian’s property in their frenzied craving for interest payments, but, conspiring against our lives and for our destruction, they feast on the living blood of our sons, afflicting them with terrible punishments in their synagogues and cruelly slaughtering them in place of Christ.”²¹ The use of these phrases was meaningful; it harkened back to the language of the Brescia Council’s earlier condemnations of Jewish usury.²² The death of Simon in 1475 allowed Tiberino to renew calls not only for the Jews’ expulsion from Trent but also, and much more ominously, the elimination “of this savage race from the whole Christian world” so that “the remembrance of them [may] utterly vanish from the land of the living.”²³

But when Tiberino wrote these words, the trial of the Jews was just beginning: nothing in the existing records suggests that Tiberino’s writing was based on what he learned from testimonies of the arrested Jews. Tiberino’s April 4 letter to the Brescia Senate demonstrates that the deck was stacked against the Jews from the very beginning. A powerful narrative was set down, miracles were being carefully recorded, and Bishop Hinderbach was quite eager to disseminate Tiberino’s story.²⁴

What May Have Been Known by April 4

When Simon’s father Andreas reported his son’s disappearance to the bishop, he appears not to have mentioned Jews; he thought the boy drowned in the canal.²⁵ Only when news spread across the town and the search under the auspices of the city government began in earnest did rumors start circulating that Jews might have kidnapped the boy. But when Samuel’s house was searched on Good Friday (March 24), no body, nor even suspicious signs were discovered. Indeed, it seems that the Jews fully cooperated with the search, with Brunetta, Samuel’s wife, providing tools as needed.²⁶

On Sunday night, March 26, Jews discovered the body of a toddler dressed in a dark-gray garment and inexpensive shoes (uno pari caligarum et sotularium). Tobias reported the discovery to the authorities, and officials soon arrived to examine the body. After an initial autopsy it was deemed that the death must have occurred recently, since the body was still flexible, the skin pink, and blood still present and flowing.²⁷ Though the body was retrieved fully dressed, there were apparently wounds underneath the clothing, including on the tip of the boy’s penis. Initial interviews with Samuel and Tobias about the discovery of the body apparently differed, but records of their content have not been preserved. Even though Samuel was first officially interrogated on March 31 and Tobias not until April 3, on the day the body was found—March 26—the decision was made to arrest eight Jews: Samuel, Tobias, Engel, and five others. They were arrested on the grounds that, as the official protocols from November 1475 state, the wounds on the boy’s body emitted blood when Jews were present, a proof, it was believed, of Jews’ culpability in the boy’s death “because experience shows that wounds on the dead emit blood when a murderer stands near the corpse.”²⁸

The next day, on March 27, the body, now in the Church of St. Peter’s, was identified as Simon’s, and another autopsy was performed by two physicians, one of whom was Giovanni Mattia Tiberino of Brescia, the bishop’s personal physician. During that second autopsy, the physicians agreed that the boy must have died recently, at the earliest on Saturday night—but as the trial progressed and a narrative set in, the time of death would change to fit better with the timeline of Christ’s passion. Ten more Jews are arrested on that day, among them Brunetta.

The podestà de Salis wanted to follow up on the rumors of Jews killing Christian children during the Easter-Passover season, because such rumors provided legal grounds to open a trial against the Jews. It just so happened that a Jew who had converted to Catholicism, Giovanni da Feltre, was imprisoned at that time in Trent for another crime. De Salis, “wanting to get information whether it was true that Jews are used to killing Christian boys and taking their blood, as it is reported,” interrogated the convert under oath.²⁹ The prisoner, Giovanni da Feltre, recalled what appeared to be a real case of blood libel from 1440, claiming that many years ago his father, who had decades ago lived in Landschut in “lower Germany” (Bavaria), had told him that that “some Jews” in his town had killed a Christian boy “to get his blood and use it.” The authorities arrested all the town’s Jews, except for those who, like his father, escaped. Those who were captured were burned at the stake, some forty-five Jews, “but it is not clear how the child was killed, nor by whom.” Asked if he, when he was still a Jew, or his father had ever used such blood, Giovanni gave a response that, at least as recorded, is ambiguous: it focuses on a description of a ritual in the Passover seder when red wine is spilled to mark the ten plagues in Egypt; the first one is, of course, blood. Giovanni noted that his father “had received the blood and put it in his wine cup, in which there was wine, and from there he sprinkled it on the table, cursing the Christian faith.”³⁰ Blood was also used, Giovanni seems to have said, in the making of the Passover bread, but he did not know how it was done.

It is unclear in what language Giovanni told this story. The testimony as it is preserved now is in a Latin summary, but that was surely not the language he used to testify. This linguistic distance makes it impossible to know what was actually said. It might be that Giovanni da Feltre simply recounted a story he had heard from his father about Jews accused of killing a Christian boy in Landschut in 1440. It is also possible that the convert of some years recalled fragments of memories about the Passover seder. It is possible that he described the spilling of wine, when the plagues, including the plague of blood, were mentioned. What was actually said in his testimony will remain unknown, but, importantly, the way it was recorded in the Latin trial records sent to Rome served to justify the legal procedures used in Trent in the aftermath of Simon’s death by validating rumors that Jews committed such crimes.

From a legal point of view, that kind of validation was what the authorities needed to proceed with their investigation of Simon’s death as murder by Jews. And it may be why Giovanni da Feltre’s testimony was sought and included in the records, even though it did not meet the legal requirements for proper witnesses—honest, bona fide witnesses, not infamis personae like Giovanni da Feltre who was imprisoned for another crime.³¹ In this light his testimony could not pass legal muster, but it served to justify proceeding against the Jews.

The following days were spent on interrogations of both Christians and Jews about what they heard or saw in the days following Simon’s disappearance and about the circumstances surrounding the finding of the body. Between March 27 and April 4, seven Christians, including Giovanni da Feltre and another Jewish convert, Roper the Tailor, and nine Jewish men and women were examined. These early testimonies seem innocuous, and many shared similar details. On March 28, Anna, the wife of Samuel’s son Israel, told the podestà de Salis that Seligman (known in the Latin records as Bonaventura), Samuel’s cook, had discovered the body on Sunday evening when he was asked to fetch water from the canal under Samuel’s house. He immediately notified Brunetta, Samuel’s wife. That same day, March 28, Seligman was brought to the torture chamber to testify, where he said that when he saw something submerged in water he thought it was “some skin or entrails of an animal,” which he had seen “many times in this canal” before. But when he notified his mistress of the find, she inquired if it might be the corpse of the boy.³² The podestà wanted to know why Brunetta thought it might have been Simon’s body, implying she was in on the murder. Seligman answered matter of factly that the authorities had already searched for the child in the house and in the canal.

Seligman then recounted that on that Sunday evening when he told Brunetta about the body, the Jewish men were in synagogue, which was in Samuel’s house. He did not know what happened next because he stayed in the kitchen, but, he testified under torture, that that some Jews were worried “something bad” would befall them when Samuel’s house was being searched by the podestà on Friday. They surely knew that vicious rumors were circulating around the town. And yet, until the body was found the Jews did not seem particularly troubled and continued with their celebration of Passover. When asked why Jews visiting Trent did not flee when Simon disappeared, Seligman responded that first they stayed because of the holidays, as the first two days of Passover were immediately followed by the Sabbath. Second, they did not flee on Sunday, because “they did not believe anything bad would come upon them.”³³ Under torture the cook confirmed his testimony several times and was not interrogated again until April 10, almost a week after Tiberino had written his first version of Simon’s story.

The testimonies of the other Jews corresponded to what Seligman the cook had said. Each person may have added personal details about what they specifically did, but their stories overlapped: the body was discovered in the canal running under Samuel’s house on Sunday evening while the men were in the synagogue finishing their evening prayers. Brunetta informed them about the discovery, and they immediately notified the bishop of the gruesome find.³⁴

Even the other Seligman (or Bonaventura, as he appears in the Latin records), son of Mayer (or Mohar), whose testimony under torture on March 28 provided some elements of confirmation for those claiming that Jews must have killed Simon, at first told the same story.³⁵ On Sunday, after the evening prayers, Seligman, Mayer’s son, left the synagogue, which was in Samuel’s house, and went to play cards with women at Tobias’s house, staying there for about an hour. He then returned to Samuel’s house, whereupon Tobias asked him to follow him and his servant Ioaff with a light to the cellar, where the canal was. Ioaff went down into the water and retrieved Simon’s body. According to Seligman, Tobias then went to the castle to notify the authorities. The interrogators decided that Seligman “did not want to tell the truth” and ordered him tortured. Soon Seligman broke and changed his story. He said that on Saturday, March 25, around noon, he was at Engel’s house eating lunch with Isaac, Engel’s servant. After lunch they both left and went over to Samuel’s house. Isaac then told Seligman that he “had killed the boy, but he did not tell him anything how he had killed him, but that he killed him in Engel’s house, … [and] that he had killed him on Thursday night …, and that Schweitzer, a [Christian] inhabitant of Trent near the canal, was the one who had delivered and brought the said boy [still] alive to the house of the said Engel.” Tortured again, Seligman added that Isaac also told him that on Thursday night he “had struck the boy with his fist on the back of his head, whereupon the boy vomited up blood through his mouth, and that they collected this blood into a small pot [cadinello]. And that Schweitzer received twenty coins [renenses] for bringing the boy to Engel’s house.” Schweitzer then carried the boy to Samuel’s house.

Schweitzer, who was then engaged in a dispute with Samuel and Israel over money, was also implicated in the crime by Vitale, Samuel’s servant, who was interrogated both with and without torture on March 29.³⁶ Vitale confirmed it was Seligman the cook who had discovered the body, but he could not add any more information about the discovery. He did, however, speculate that Schweitzer might have been the one behind Simon’s death, dumping the body into the canal under Samuel’s house. On April 3, interrogated again, this time under torture, Vitale confirmed his earlier testimony; during the trial the Jews’ supporters would maintain that Schweitzer, the Christian man, had played a role in Simon’s death.³⁷

A third testimony that strengthened de Salis’s case against the Jews and influenced his decision to charge them with the killing of Simon was given on March 28 by a German-speaking Christian woman, Margareta Gelbegret. She claimed that some twelve years earlier, when she was living next door to Samuel in the house now inhabited by Tobias, her son had also disappeared but was later found alive in Samuel’s house.³⁸ Margareta, like other Christians interrogated in the initial stages of the trial, had items pawned with Jews.

Although the three testimonies by Giovanni da Feltre, Margareta Gelbegret, and Seligman (Mayer’s son) provided much-needed grounding to support the legal charges against the Jews, none of the testimonies from March 26 through April 4 contained the details or rhetoric found in Tiberino’s letter. In fact, even Seligman’s damning testimony contradicted what Tiberino wrote. Others did too. Schweitzer, the Christian man whom Seligman and Vitale implicated in the murder and who was arrested on March 28 and interrogated on March 31, also doubted that Jews could have killed Simon.³⁹ Schweitzer recounted his conversation with Andreas, Simon’s father, on Thursday night after Andreas had failed to find his son, telling him, according to the Latin account of his testimony, that Simon must have fallen into the canal. Andreas responded that he had looked for the boy there, but did not find him. As they spoke, two bystanders reported that some people were saying the boy was in the Jews’ house, though others speculated that he must have drowned. “Whatever it is,” Schweitzer replied, “[now] it is not the time to look for him,” and went to bed. The next day, Schweitzer went to participate in the Good Friday celebrations in the Trent churches. After coming back home, Andreas and Schweitzer went again to look for Simon, now both believing the boy to be dead, drowned in the canal. Toward the end of his interrogation, Schweitzer was asked if he “knew or in his soul pondered how the boy had been killed or how he had arrived into Jews’ hands.” Schweitzer responded that he “greatly doubted” how this would have been possible, because he “knew that the boy had first disappeared on Thursday evening, and these Jews never exit their homes after noon on Thursday.” But he offered that one Iohannes, a gravedigger who buried Jews, may have brought the boy into the Jews’ house. During the interrogation, Schweitzer also admitted to discord between him and some Jews, especially Engel and his wife.

Schweitzer’s testimony raised questions about the validity of the accusations against the Jews. And although he testified relatively early in the trial, on March 31, in the official records sent to Rome his testimony was relegated to the very end of the volume, after the testimonies of all the Jews and reports of their execution.⁴⁰ In contrast, the testimonies by Giovanni da Feltre, Margareta Gelbegret, and Seligman, son of Mayer, which made the accusations against Jews plausible, were placed right at the beginning of the trial records.⁴¹ They appeared at the beginning not because they were delivered earlier—indeed Seligman’s material includes testimonies from later dates—but because they helped set the stage for the narrative the official records sought to tell to justify the proceedings against the Jews. Still, however damning their testimonies might have been, they contained nothing that could have given Tiberino material for his April 4 story. Even the testimonies of two key figures—Samuel on March 29 and 31 and on April 3 and the April 4 testimony by the old Moses, who in Tiberino’s story circumcised Simon—undermined the version Tiberino prepared.

Samuel’s description of the finding of Simon’s body and the immediate aftermath, including Tobias’s notification of the bishop, overlapped with that of the others and did not implicate him or other Jews.⁴² Even under torture he asserted that neither he “nor other Jews are killers.”⁴³ Indeed, “none of the Jews was guilty of this, nor did he believe that the said boy had been killed; he drowned”; after all, Simon’s mother lived next to the canal. On April 3, subjected to more torture, he again affirmed his own innocence and that of “other Jews, because they are not guilty.”⁴⁴ And, while undergoing torture, suspended on the ropes, he turned to the podestà, asking, “Lord podestà, where did you learn that Christian blood is valuable and useful?” De Salis responded that he had learned it from “Jews like Samuel.” After this exchange the torture intensified, and Samuel screamed to God for help.⁴⁵ He was kept on the ropes for “two-thirds of an hour” and then was let down and returned to prison.

In the days preceding Tiberino’s April 4 letter to the Senate of Brescia, all the Jews, with the exception of Seligman, son of Mayer, denied culpability, and with small variations their stories were in agreement. Also, on April 4, during his first recorded interrogation, the old Moses affirmed the innocence of all the Jews and presented arguments against blood accusations, explaining rules in Jewish law that made such charges absurd: “It must not be believed that he, Moses, or other Jews did that, because in the ten commandments of Moses given by God it is commanded to Jews that no one may kill or eat blood, and on account of that Jews cut the throat of animals they intend to eat so that a great amount of blood may leave the animals’ bodies, and then they salt the meat, so that more blood can be extracted.”⁴⁶ Moses’s argument was similar to that offered earlier by the popes in their medieval bulls protecting Jews from such false accusations. Moses added an example of a false accusation in which a Christian, “enemy of the Jews,” brought the body of a Christian boy to a Jew’s house. The Jew was arrested and tortured, but he did not confess to anything. The Christian man eventually did, revealing the accusation was completely false.

From the early days of interrogations Tiberino could not have learned the details he included in his April 4 address to the Senate of Brescia. Even if one accepts that not everything said then was included in the records, surely if there had been even one witness or one testimony that had produced the damning details found in Tiberino’s account, it would have been included in the records sent to Rome. After all, such evidence would have made the charges against the Jews even stronger. Instead, the early testimonies weakened the case against the Jews. That changed a few days after April 4, when confessions under torture began increasingly to conform to Tiberino’s account.

“What Should I Say?”

These are the words Vitale, Samuel’s servant, spoke to the interrogators on April 13, 1475.⁴⁷ Similarly, on April 15, after having been asked repeatedly if he was telling the truth, Lazarus, a Jewish traveler who found himself in Trent when Simon died—whose testimony is not included in the records sent to Rome, but can be found in the German version at the Yeshiva University Museum in New York City and in the Latin protocols in Vienna—finally pleaded with the interrogators, “Tell me what you want me to say and I will say it.”⁴⁸ From early on, the interrogators seemed to have had a specific “truth” in mind when questioning the Jews, and wishing to hear it, turning to torture to elicit it. When first interrogated, under only the threat of torture, the Jews offered what would become the first version of events—for days, this version remained quite consistent, containing details about the finding of the body and affirming Jewish innocence. This remained the case even when torture was first implemented.

But this first version was not “the truth” the officials were looking for, and when the Jews did not change it after several days, they were subjected to more torture, sometimes excessive, and more questions. Over time all the Jews broke and confessed to the murder of Simon. For example, when the second Seligman, son of Mayer, answered, “I do not know,” to a question about the whereabouts of Brunetta, Samuel, and others when the body was retrieved from the canal under Samuel’s house, the podestà, “seeing that he did not want to tell the truth ordered him undressed and lifted” on the ropes.⁴⁹ And Vitale’s question “What should I say?” came at the end of long interrogation under torture, in which he was even made to listen secretly to Israel’s confession, also under torture, in which Israel implicated Vitale.⁵⁰

The “truth” the officials were looking for was sketched in Tiberino’s letter. If the early accounts emerging from the first interrogations were relatively consistent—denying Jews’ role in Simon’s death—the increasing pressure, repeated questioning, and relentless torture led to the first confessions to the murder being made on April 7. These initial confessions were contradictory and confusing, but gradually they gained some coherence, often with language and phrases evoking Tiberino’s account. Such language is most pronounced in the testimony by Tobias from April 9, but phrases paralleling those in Tiberino’s account are also found in the Latin testimonies of Engel on April 8; Seligman the cook on April 10; and Seligman, son of Mayer, on April 11.⁵¹ It must be remembered that the Latin protocols sent to Rome were dated November 15, 1475—months after Tiberino’s story had been widely disseminated in print.

Tobias was first interrogated on April 3, 1475, more than a week after Simon’s body was found. The first questions concerned the circumstances of the finding of Simon’s body and the description of his injuries. When the body was found, Tobias said, the Jews decided the authorities needed to be notified; they wanted officials to come to the scene because they feared they might be implicated in the crime. As Tobias appears to have noted, “We wanted that one or two [officials] from the castle be here, so they could see the crime committed against us, because some Christian must have killed this boy and then thrown the body in the canal, so that it would be brought by water into the house, and this way they would have a reason to say that we, Jews, kill.”⁵² Under torture, he confirmed what he had said earlier. On April 7, more explicit questions about Jews killing Christians were asked, and Tobias again denied everything, observing it was Christians who said that Jews killed Christian children. He was then tortured excessively and, “almost dead,” had to be sent to his cell to rest.⁵³

The next day, April 8, Tobias’s recorded testimony began to resemble Tiberino’s address.⁵⁴ According to its Latin protocols, on Wednesday March 22, Samuel, his son Israel, Moses, Mayer (or Mohar), his son Seligman (Bonaventura), Engel, and Tobias gathered in Samuel’s house to plot how to obtain the “blood of some Christian child,” whom Tobias was chosen to find. He objected to undertaking this task because he was “poor and had children to take care of.”⁵⁵ Samuel then ordered Tobias to do what he was asked and promised to take care of his family. The next day, Tobias began to wander the streets until he came to Canal Street (via fossati) and passed by Andreas’s house, where he saw the boy. He held out his hand for Simon, who took it. Speaking softly to the boy and giving him a coin to encourage him to go, Tobias took him to Samuel’s house. Samuel was already waiting at the door. Tobias passed Simon over to Samuel, who closed the door, and Tobias returned home. At home, Tobias could neither eat nor sleep. On Saturday, he went to Samuel’s house to attend services in the synagogue, where he saw the body exposed “on a table where they put books, and this table is set in the middle of the synagogue.” This time Tobias did not describe the killing; asked why Jews needed Christian blood, he explained that they required it during jubilee years and that this was a jubilee year. As for other reasons, Tobias claimed ignorance, saying he was “an illiterate man,” a curious statement given that most scholars present Tobias as a physician. The descriptions of the plot, the kidnapping, and the delivery of Simon, as well as the discussion of the jubilee year as seen in Tobias’s recorded testimony, resemble Tiberino’s account. But it is in the testimony of the following day, April 9, that the language becomes similar to that of Tiberino’s letter. For example, apparently Tobias said that when all were gathered before Passover at Samuel’s house, Samuel said that they “had much meat and fish,” to which Engel said that only one thing was missing, and everyone understood that he meant Christian blood.⁵⁶ Tobias’s description of the killing and the April 10 testimony of Seligman the cook also contained verbiage similar to that found in Tiberino’s April 4 letter to the Senate Brescia.⁵⁷

In his April 4 letter Tiberino claimed that Jews uttered curses in Hebrew while killing Simon—“Tolle Iesse mina elle parecheff elle passussem pachmalem”—which according to Tiberino explained meant: “Let us butcher this boy just like Jesus, the Christian’s God, who is nothing.”⁵⁸ These Hebrew words in a slightly different spelling are also found in the April 11 testimony by Seligman, son of Mayer,⁵⁹ even though he said he did not know what these words meant. Still, Tiberino’s supposed translation was incorrect. The phrase, except for the word “tolle,” comes from Psalm 20: 7–8, which is part of the daily prayers: the words iesse mina in Tiberino’s letter come from יֵ֣שַׁע יְמִינֽו (yesh’a yemino; deliverance of his right arm), the last words of verse 7, and Elle comes from the beginning of verse 8:אלה ברכב ואלה בסוסים(elle ba-rechev ve-elle ba-susim; these on chariot, and these on horses). The rest of the psalm was understood as an affirmation of the validity of Jewish worship of God.⁶⁰ But the words “passusem pachmalem”—ba-susim and ba-gemalim (on horses and on camels)—may also refer to Exodus 9:3, which is included in the Passover Haggadah to describe a threat of pestilence that would strike the Egyptians if Pharaoh would refuse to let the Hebrews go.⁶¹ The German translation of the trial protocols includes a Hebrew transcription of the words, a transliteration, and an inaccurate Latin interpretation of them: “Suspensus Jhesus hereticus ista in equis et ista in camelis crucibus.”⁶² The phrase in the psalm, yesh’a yemino, “deliverance of his right arm,” was mistranslated because of the onomatopoeic character of the words Yesh’a as Jesus (Yeshu in the Hebrew tradition) and yemino as ha-min (heretic) to mean “Jesus the heretic.” To be sure, in Christian Europe, these original verses may have been understood by Jews in a polemical way against Christian beliefs, but they certainly did not mean what Tiberino and the Trent officials claimed them to mean.

As the trial of the Jews continued, questions were raised about the legality of the proceedings, and on April 21 the trial was suspended by the order of Duke Sigismund of Tyrol, the city’s secular overlord. It was allowed to resume on June 6, thanks to Bishop Hinderbach’s lobbying and propaganda efforts, and resulted in the executions between June 21 and June 23 of seven men: Isaac, Engel, Tobias, Vital, Mayer, and both Seligmans (Bonaventuras). The two Seligmans asked to be baptized before execution, saving themselves from death at the stake by being first decapitated. The old Moses was found dead in his cell, on June 18, four days after finally confessing. Still, he was formally sentenced after death, his body dragged to the site of execution and tied to a wheel.⁶³ The final summaries of the Jews’ testimonies recorded before their execution aligned with Tiberino’s account, and, chronologically, the events they recounted fit more closely the passion of Christ.⁶⁴ If following the first autopsies after the boy’s body was found on Sunday, March 26, it was believed that Simon must have died no earlier than Saturday, by the end of the first phase of the trial, his death was noted to have occurred earlier during the Holy Week, in effort to fit Simon’s death into the story of the passion of Christ. By the time the Jews were executed in June, the narrative was firmly set, an updated version of Tiberino’s letter was printed in Rome, and iconography representing Simon widely disseminated. (Eventually, Simon’s feast would be established on March 24 to mark his death on a date corresponding to Good Friday in 1475.)

With the eight men dead, there were still several Jews, including men, women, and children, in custody. After the news of the executions and the other Jews’ imprisonment reached Rome, the pope intervened. On July 23, 1475, he ordered another suspension of the trial and soon sent his envoy Battista de’ Giudici, bishop of Ventimiglia, to Trent, giving him broad authority to investigate if the trial had been conducted fairly, and to examine the charges against the Jews and alleged miracles around Simon’s body.⁶⁵ Despite his broad authority, de’ Giudici was thwarted at every level, and his attempts to end the trial and secure the release of the women and children failed. After a brief hiatus, the trial and the imprisonment of the remaining Jews continued into the first months of 1476, while in Rome a commission of cardinals was deliberating about its validity. Everything hinged on the validity of trial records and evidence marshaled to convict the Jews.

The Narrative in the Trial Records

The legality of the trial was challenged first by Duke Sigismund of Tyrol and then by Pope Sixtus IV. At issue were its jurisdiction, procedures, the excessive use of torture to obtain confessions, and the confiscation of Jews’ property before completion of the trial. To defend themselves against the charges, Trent officials had to produce trial records. For that reason, the records of the trial as they came down to us are a consciously structured narrative aimed at addressing these charges. Some eleven full or partial records of the trial of the Jews survived in Latin and German, although there may have been other copies that circulated among the allies of Bishop Hinderbach with his permission.⁶⁶ Some, like the records of Brunetta’s trial, have been lost even though their existence is mentioned in other sources.⁶⁷

The earliest surviving protocols of the trial can be dated to November 1475.⁶⁸ They are the official copy of the records in Latin sent from Trent to Rome as evidence in the investigation of the validity of the trial of the Jews. This copy, written on parchment, contains only materials from the first phase of the trial of the major male defendants, excluded are the women and the minor male figures, such as Lazarus. Yet as an official, notarized copy sent to Rome, it is significant because it played a major role in decisions from Rome regarding the validity of the trial and the cult of Simon.

There are differences between the surviving records, even Bishop Hinderbach noted errors on the margins of his personal copy.⁶⁹ There exist no “raw” copies of interrogations from the trial taken in the vernacular in real time during the interrogations, and there is “no trace” of the copy of the records prepared by Bishop Battista de’ Giudici, who had been sent by the pope to investigate matters or of copies obtained by Jews and their advocates.⁷⁰ Neither is there any trace of the “authentic” copy, sealed by both Hinderbach and de’ Giudici and sent to Rome in September 1475.

All preserved records of the Trent trial are thus those prepared by Hinderbach’s officials; they are mediated by their purpose, time of their creation, and language. As R. Po-Chia Hsia has noted, it was not just the “problem of translation” of speech into text, which is always an issue in historical records, but also of translation “from one language to another,” with four languages at play—German, Hebrew, Italian, and Latin—and none shared by all involved.⁷¹ In a region where German and Italian cultures mixed and clashed, some people, including the podestà, spoke only Italian, whereas others knew only German; few shared both. And thus, a translator was needed to bridge the linguistic gaps during the interrogations and in the creation of the records. In the official records in Latin, the already mediated encounters during the interrogations were even further removed from what was said. Moreover, the German protocols are translations from Latin completed after the Trent affair finally ended in 1478, with a papal bull pronouncing the trial lawfully conducted.⁷² The Hebrew language was used for snippets from Jewish prayers and rituals and was sometimes only transcribed phonetically in Latin letters, but at least in one instance—the German manuscript now at the Yeshiva University Museum—words were also written out in places in Hebrew characters.⁷³ With so much lost just in translation, the trial records cannot be taken at face value to learn what was said or asked during the trials; rather, they document how those responsible for preparing and preserving the records wanted the proceedings to be represented and remembered. The protocols are, as David Stern has noted, “extremely tendentious documents” that were “composed in order to defend the actions” of Bishop Hinderbach and other Trent officials.⁷⁴

The apologetic nature of the trial records is most evident in the preface written by the translator of the records into German, identified by scholars as the Dominican Erhard von Pappenheim. Von Pappenheim explicitly addressed the criticism of the trial and emphatically affirmed its validity. The hefty volume of the trial records in German now at the Yeshiva University Museum opens with a German translation of the papal bull by Sixtus IV from June 20, 1478, in which the pope accepted the validity of the trial (but not of the cult).⁷⁵ The bull itself is preceded by a comment, written in red ink: “Here in the first place is the papal bull, in which, praise be the diligence and judicial proceedings, our Holy Father the Pope recognizes and declares the duly conducted trial and sentencing against the Jews of Trent, recorded below, on account of the holy, innocent boy named Simon, and that the said trial against the said Jews was conducted in a judicious and upright manner, as one may learn hereafter.”⁷⁶

After the translated papal bull, written in black ink, von Pappenheim asserted, again in red ink, “Justice commanded, in such grave matter, that the truth be thoroughly and properly examined through judicial torture, so that such a great evil would not go unpunished, or that anyone innocent might suffer or be suspected on its accounts. Therefore, the podestà in Trent himself ordered the Jews to be seized, which he was obliged to on account of his office, and earnestly examined according to court proceedings.”⁷⁷ Von Pappenheim also adjusted the order of the protocols, foregrounding Samuel “in view of the fact,” as he explained, “that [Samuel] was almost the leader, the instigator and originator of most things, and in my opinion, certain things are said more clearly in his confession.”⁷⁸ And this also is how Samuel was described in a major legal opinion issued in 1478 by Giovanni Francesco Pavini, a Roman legist who sided with Hinderbach.⁷⁹

From the language to the organization of the records, every decision had a specific effect. The surviving protocols—not just those in the German translation—were not organized chronologically, and their organization varies in the different copies. They all begin with the inquest held in the first two days after Simon’s body was found, but then the trial records are organized by person, and only within that chronologically. This order should not be surprising, because it is quite likely that the raw records were also organized this way, with separate quires devoted to each person and created by the clerk present during the interrogations.⁸⁰ Yet such organization of files, as the German text shows, also allowed for flexibility in their arrangement. For example, the order of persons in the Latin records sent to Rome followed the chronological order according to the time of the first interrogation. But in the Vienna manuscript, Lazarus, who was interrogated in April 1475, appears only toward the end, after the records of the trial of women from 1476, and is missing from the Vatican copy altogether; by contrast, in the German translation of the records, the interrogations of women end the volume.⁸¹

As von Pappenheim’s introduction suggests, he and likely also other clerks may have understood that order mattered: if the records were to appear chronologically the effect would have been different. The early testimonies by both Jews and Christians frequently raised doubts about the charge that Jews killed Simon. They showed relative consistency in telling how the body was discovered and what Jews were doing between the time of Simon’s disappearance and the discovery of his body. The reader would have noticed the increasing application of torture, the desperation of Jews not knowing what the prosecution wanted to hear, and then a gradual shift to admissions of guilt to correspond with Tiberino’s account. But when organized according to the person, with a choice of early testimonies—like those of Giovanni da Feltre, Margareta Gelbegret, and Seligman (Mayer’s son)—foregrounded to increase the plausibility of Jewish responsibility for Simon’s murder in order to justify the trial, the readers saw inconsistency, changing stories, final admissions of guilt, and execution of the accused, one by one. Already from the early pages, they knew how the story would end, with Jews admitting to killing Simon in the cruelest way. By the time they reached the testimony of, for example, Moses, who explained, using similar arguments found in medieval papal bulls of protection, why it was absurd to accuse Jews of such crimes, the readers’ minds would have been made up and the Jews’ denials and defenses would have rung hollow. Such order shows Jews as liars, changing their story with each interrogation.

Contemporary actors understood that these records were meant to tell a story—one already well known thanks to Tiberino and others; and one that, by the time the surviving official records were sent to Rome on November 15, 1475, was already visually represented in print and paintings, eliciting even a prohibition against such representations from the pope himself. The records thus played an important role in the affair and subsequent history, cementing in place Hinderbach’s version of the affair.

At the time, the stakes were quite high, even higher than proving the guilt or innocence of the accused Jews. Were the trial to be deemed invalid, this judgment would potentially undermine the validity of the cult of Simon, which was being promoted with great passion by a bishop who in Trent represented both religious and political authority. The bishop’s credibility was thus at stake. In a borderland like Trent, where Italian and German cultures met and clashed, and where political influence of the Holy Roman Empire was confronted by the powers dominating the Italian peninsula, the trial also revealed fissures between local, imperial, and papal authority, as each sought to assert their standing. In the long run, the records would affirm the validity of the cult of Simon, undermining the centuries of protection of Jews; in the twentieth century, their reexamination contributed to the abolition of the cult. And, for contemporaries, the contents of these records did not go uncontested.⁸²

Fight over the Records

As soon as the trial began in late March 1475, Jews activated their connections and sought to stop it. In late April, Duke Sigismund of Austria, who, as the duke of Tyrol, had Trent Jews under his protection since 1450, ordered the trial suspended, beginning a period of intense lobbying by both Jews and their supporters, and Hinderbach and his friends, with Hinderbach increasing his efforts to promote the cult and his version of the story.⁸³ On April 30, Hinderbach wrote to the poet Rafaele Zovenzoni, sending him a copy of Tiberino’s address and asking him to write poems glorifying “our new martyr,” while regretting that he could not at that time punish the Jews.⁸⁴ In this lengthy letter the bishop complained about the Jews’ influence over “false Christians” who were helping Jews at the court of the duke. Hinderbach himself hoped to intercede with the duke and present the truth to him “in light clearer than noon light.” In May, Hinderbach’s ally in Innsbruck, the seat of duke of Tyrol, informed him that “many Jews from Padua, with one Doctor from Treviso” were intervening with the duke, sparing no expenses to vindicate the Jews.⁸⁵ In response, Hinderbach sent Zovenzoni a list of new miracles, in hopes that the duke might be persuaded of the truth of the charges and come to understand that those supporting Jews were “corrupted by their diabolic or Jewish love of money.”⁸⁶ To squash the Jews’ “machinations,” the bishop included some materials, among them Tiberino’s account, proving the martyrdom of the “most innocent little boy,” hoping their effect would be to decrease the “false commendation of Jews or false Christians.” But Hinderbach’s lobbying with the duke of Austria did not end there. As he later wrote to Pope Sixtus IV, to counteract Jewish supporters and “their iniquity and perversity” at the court in Innsbruck, he sent his own envoys with “information about this crime, with all circumstances and similar cases.”⁸⁷ In June, succumbing to Hinderbach’s intense lobbying, the duke allowed the trial to resume, and Samuel was the first to return to the torture chamber on June 6.⁸⁸ The others did too, and by June 23 all eight were executed.

News about Trent reached Rome as well. What was happening in Trent had ramifications not just for Jews but also for canon law and the authority of the pope. Accusations against Jews for killing Christians to use their blood were prohibited by popes, and the claims of miracles, if false, could be “injurious” to the Catholic Church. Miracles needed to be carefully examined and vetted. Well documented and verified, they could elevate an individual to sainthood and help the authorization of a shrine. Hinderbach understood that documented miracles had the power to help fulfill his goal to canonize Simon. Thus he took pains not only to document but also notarize them, making each record resemble formal court affidavits, with witness depositions in the presence of notaries.⁸⁹

Miracles linked to Simon, and frequently reported to Rome as the papal commission deliberated, played a supporting role in affirming the validity of the trial.⁹⁰ If, on the one hand, the trial needed to be valid to justify the claims of Simon’s martyrdom and sainthood, then, on the other, miracles demonstrated that he was indeed a martyr and a saint, and therefore the trial proceedings, in which Jews confessed to killing Simon, must be valid—a circular argument, to be sure, but one that worked in the long term. Hinderbach understood this relationship, and in his June 30 letter to Sixtus IV, he extolled the miracles and reported the “devotion and ardor” of pilgrims.⁹¹ He also defended “the truth of the crime, and the legal and legitimate trial conducted by the [city] captain, the podestà, and other officials and administrators of justice.”

The pope was concerned with both aspects of the trial: the validity of the accusations and proceedings against the Jews, and the claims of miracles. On July 23, 1475, exactly a month after the two Seligmans, the last victims of the first wave of the executions, lost their lives, Sixtus IV informed Hinderbach that he was sending an envoy to examine the affair and ordered him to suspend the proceedings.⁹² By the time the pope intervened, Tiberino’s account of “beato Simone” had been widely disseminated; a version was printed in Rome on June 19 by Bartholomeus Guldinbeck and reprinted on July 24, the day after the pope ordered the trial suspended.⁹³ On August 3, the pope gave his envoy, Battista de’ Giudici, detailed instructions for his mission and, in a separate document, exhorted Hinderbach to cooperate with de’ Giudici, a respected Dominican, “a professor of sacred theology, man endowed with learning and integrity,” while assuring that he did not doubt Hinderbach’s “zeal for justice and Christian religion.”⁹⁴ The envoy’s task, the pope informed Hinderbach, was to dispel detractions about the case that reached him from “many princes” and to understand everything in a “clearer light.”

The first task outlined in the papal mandate to the envoy was to obtain “full protocols of the trial, namely, confessions, depositions of witnesses, and others which pertain to the truth.”⁹⁵ The authentic copies were to be sealed by both Hinderbach and de’ Giudici to ensure they had not been tampered with. De’ Giudici was also to investigate if Jews did indeed procure the boy, “as it is said,” and killed him, “with what ceremonies and torments,” what they may have done with blood, and if they did any similar act at another time. The bishop of Ventimiglia was also to find out if “any deception may not have been committed in this accusation” and whether it was true or false that the Jews were guilty. The third task was investigation of the miracles to determine whether they were indeed “true miracles” or whether there was some “delusion or deception” involved, because “we have heard here that such great fame of these miracles” drew great crowds of people and even “images were painted in every place in towns.” This was a serious matter, and de’ Giudici was to examine these claims diligently, so that the pope would know whether to “approve or condemn” them. And then there was a legal question regarding the Jews’ confiscated, or about to be confiscated, property. De’ Giudici was to ensure that it all would be inventoried by a notary so that nothing was destroyed. The pope also gave de’ Giudici authority to seek the release of the women and children, “so the innocent may not be punished for the guilty” (cum non sint insontes pro sontibus puniendi). Finally, while the pope asked the bishop of Ventimiglia to work together with Hinderbach, he, ominously gave permission, as a last resort, for de’ Giudici to move the investigation to another city if he was unable to conduct his business in Trent.

Hinderbach welcomed the papal envoy with splendor and honor when he finally arrived in Trent on September 2, 1475, but it was only a performance. A campaign to impugn his reputation had already begun. Just four days after his arrival, de’ Giudici wrote to Cardinal Stefano Nardini, archbishop of Milan and a close advisor to Pope Sixtus IV, about the rumors circulating about him in Trent, not just in the court of the bishop of Trent but also on the streets: they accused de’ Giudici of coming to Trent to help Jews and being “corrupted” by Jewish money. But it was not just words but also deeds that terrified de’ Giudici: one of his servants was killed in Rovereto, a nearby town under Venetian rule.⁹⁶

Although on his arrival, de’ Giudici immediately requested copies of the records of the trial, for seventeen days he was not given access to any material, receiving only promises instead.⁹⁷ These records, de’ Giudici wrote, were necessary to move to the other items of his agenda. But Hinderbach was playing games. He appeared to de’ Giudici as “pious and merciful,” telling the papal envoy that he frequently told the podestà not to be cruel to the prisoners, because “if the innocent are tortured and die, even though they are Jews, their blood will cry out to God in heaven against you.”⁹⁸ While Hinderbach used these sweet words, on September 6, just four days after the arrival of the bishop of Ventimiglia, the first illustrated version of Simon’s story was printed in German in Trent by Albrecht Kunne, showing the boy’s kidnapping and death, asserting his martyrdom and miracles, and strengthening public opinion against de’ Giudici’s efforts.⁹⁹ (Figs. 2.2–2.5)

FIG. 2.2   Tobias capturing Simon, Hystorie von Simon zu Trient (Trent: Albert Kunne, September 6, 1475), fol. 2v. Bayerische StaatsBibliothek, 2 Inc.s.a. 62#Beibd.

Still, despite the printed stories, doubts about Simon’s status abounded, increasing the urgency for de’ Giudici’s thorough investigation. The corpse of the boy was fetid, which contradicted claims that it was miraculously preserved. On September 5, the day before Kunne released the booklet about Simon, de’ Giudici had seen the corpse of Simon and nearly vomited from the stench.¹⁰⁰

Other obstacles were mounting as well. The Trentini, now engaged in a full-fledged conspiracy to promote the cult and fearful that the bishop of Ventimiglia would discover the truth of the fraudulent miracles and the unjust treatment of the Jews, made de’ Giudici’s task impossible to fulfill. They did not want to give him access to the remaining Jewish prisoners or allow him to interview additional witnesses. The envoy was under constant surveillance by Hinderbach’s men, unable to examine witnesses, and, it appears, even to have visitors. The officials were also dragging their feet about de’ Giudici’s access to the trial records. As de’ Giudici would later write, there were “many good words” he had heard from Hinderbach, but “little or nothing” was done to “investigate the truth.”¹⁰¹ Hinderbach later admitted that officials did not want to give de’ Giudici access to all the original files, fearing they would give “means of defense into the hands of enemies [timens gladium defensionis in adversariorum manibus dare].”¹⁰² To make matters worse, the living conditions of the envoy’s quarters were apparently quite uncomfortable.

FIG. 2.3   Simon’s martyrdom with Simon held by Moses, Hystorie von Simon zu Trient (Trent: Albert Kunne, September 6, 1475), fol. 3v. Bayerische StaatsBibliothek, 2 Inc.s.a. 62#Beibd.

FIG. 2.4   Simon as martyr, Hystorie von Simon zu Trient (Trent: Albert Kunne, September 6, 1475), fol. 4v. Bayerische StaatsBibliothek, 2 Inc.s.a. 62#Beibd.

Given the problems that de’ Giudici faced in Trent, the papal envoy felt he had to move out of the city to fulfill his mandate and conduct his own investigation. The bishop of Trent, the city captain, and the podestà, de’ Giudici argued, by preventing him from performing his tasks, disobeyed the pope and acted like “the Pharisees, who simulated devotion they did not have.… They feign zeal for the faith while acting scandalously … with acts and words resembling those of vipers.”¹⁰³ On September 23 de’ Giudici finally secured copies of the trial records, sealed as requested by the pope, and falling ill, he immediately departed from Trent, ostensibly for Verona. But he stopped in Rovereto, where he would stay to continue his investigation.¹⁰⁴

FIG. 2.5   Simon on the altar, Hystorie von Simon zu Trient (Trent: Albert Kunne, September 6, 1475), fol. 9v. Bayerische StaatsBibliothek, 2 Inc.s.a. 62#Beibd.

In Rovereto, he was able to have visitors. As early as the day after his departure from Trent, de’ Giudici informed Hinderbach that Jews’ advocates reached him asking for help to free those still imprisoned and requesting “with such importunity” copies of the trial. The issue of the court records became central to his conversation with the Jewish representatives, which took place in the presence of Hinderbach’s allies, Giovanni Menchey and Approvino. Perhaps because of the presence of Hinderbach’s allies, the papal envoy apparently wanted to steer the conversation away from them, as if to minimize their importance, and wondered, for example, why Jews needed such records. If to protect the living, then de’ Giudici was working with Hinderbach and his officials on freeing them; if to defend the dead, there was really not much to be done. But the Jews insisted the records were important “not to defend the dead, who cannot rise again, but the truth.” They understood, as did de’ Giudici and Hinderbach, if for different reasons, that the ramifications of the trial were far greater than obtaining justice for the Jews in Trent. The Jewish advocates wanted to defend “the living, not just those incarcerated but also those around the world,” who would be imperiled if what was in the trial records was to be regarded as true, because “it is said to contain the confessions of all the Jews, that from decade to decade, especially in the year of the Jubilee, they use the blood of Christian boys.”¹⁰⁵ With such weight given to the transcripts of the trial and the Jews’ apparent “importunity” to get them, de’ Giudici felt the need to reassure Hinderbach that he should “sleep peacefully”; the sealed trial records in his possession “shall not be open until Rome.”¹⁰⁶ Yet, if these transcripts ever reached Rome, they do not seem to have survived. Neither did another copy that de’ Giudici apparently secured, in addition to the sealed one destined for the pope.¹⁰⁷ The earliest surviving records, as we have seen, were sent from Trent, signed by the podestà Giovanni (Ioannes) de Salis and his notary Petrus de Malefaratis on November 15, 1475.¹⁰⁸

Truth and Authenticity

The question of the authenticity and trustworthiness of the trial records remained pertinent throughout the affair and beyond.¹⁰⁹ The Jews’ advocates needed authentic records to defend their innocence; de’ Giudici felt that “without them it was impossible to discover the truth” and “affirm the martyrdom of Simon.”¹¹⁰ Soon after arriving in Trent, de’ Giudici issued broad calls, threatening penalties and censure to “all who find themselves in possession of writings or trial records, both of the assertions of martyrdom, confessions and condemnations of Jews and those of any miracles.”¹¹¹ But the bishop of Trent prevented any of those announcements from being posted. Later, the papal envoy reflected that Hinderbach did all he could to control the flow of information, allowing him access only to “witnesses sent by himself,” whereas those not sent by the bishop were either unable to come or unable to speak freely. Given de’ Giudici’s inability to examine those advocating on behalf of the Jews, and thereby to conduct “duly” his investigation, he feared that existing records “grounded in the examination under torture” would not reveal the full truth.¹¹² But at issue in the fight over records were also questions of “additions and omissions” in the protocols sent to Rome that were not in the original records de’ Giudici was allowed to see in Trent.

The distrust over existing records went deeper, even during de’ Giudici’s sojourn in Trent, where he clashed, as he recounted later, with Hinderbach’s supporters seeking to discredit him and with Trent officials over the trustworthiness of notaries engaged in producing the records.¹¹³ Notaries, as Laurie Nussdorfer has shown, were “brokers of public trust”; documents drafted by them “were a superior form of proof in a court of law.”¹¹⁴ Thus, disqualifying a notary was tantamount to disqualifying documents produced by him. The Trentini tried to disqualify Raphael, a notary who worked for de’ Giudici, and instead sought to engage, as the papal envoy put it, “some corrupt Tridentine partisan [aliquis corruptus parcialis Tridentinus].”¹¹⁵ For his part, de’ Giudici concluded, after examining some miracles and finding them fraudulent, that “all notaries in Trent were falsifiers” and did not “transcribe faithfully and correctly.” He suggested hiring another notary, whom he considered trustworthy and who knew German, Italian, and Latin.¹¹⁶ The undermining of trust in notaries continued even after the papal envoy left Trent. According to Hinderbach’s allies in Trent, de’ Giudici impugned the integrity of another notary, Giovanni de Fundo, by claiming that documents prepared by him were also false.¹¹⁷ And in Rome, the issue of notaries was noted in the legal opinion issued and published in 1478 by Giovanni Francesco Pavini, in which he questioned the fact that Bishop de’ Giudici used “only one notary,” who was “suspected” of committing “grave” offenses.¹¹⁸ The public fight over notaries cast a cloud over the authenticity of any records coming out of Trent and, according to the Trentini, also those produced by the bishop of Ventimiglia.¹¹⁹

The issue of falsification of records came to the fore in the trial that began on May 14, 1476, of the priest Paolo de Novara, a copyist in Trent.¹²⁰ Paolo de Novara was a key witness to what may have been omitted or added into the records. Among the documents he transcribed were the sealed trial records given in September 1475 to de’ Giudici and a copy of the full records, sent to Emperor Frederick III then in Vienna, which must have been transcribed between the last interrogation recorded on April 12, 1476, and the beginning of Paolo’s trial in May.¹²¹

The trial focused on Paolo de Novara’s contacts with Jews and the bishop of Ventimiglia. He was accused of passing information back and forth between the Jewish women imprisoned in Trent and other Jews, especially their relatives who lived elsewhere. One of those relatives was Crassino of Novara, the father of Engel’s wife Dulceta (or Süsslein), whom Paolo called “Bona or Bella.” Paolo de Novara was accused of conspiring with Crassino and other Jews to poison the bishop of Trent and other officials involved in the trial, to steal Simon’s body, or to use “some substance” to make the body “fetid,” and, crucially, to go to Rome to testify that trial records were doctored to omit excessive torture of Jews.¹²² Paolo reported that Jews believed it was Bishop Hinderbach who had orchestrated, together with Schweitzer, the killing of Simon. He raised questions that also troubled the bishop of Ventimiglia about Jews’ guilt, false miracles, including the fact that Simon’s corpse was rotting and thus was not miraculously preserved, the falsification of trial records that served the Tridentini to underscore Jews’ guilt and thus confirm Simon’s martyrdom, and the unlawful confiscation of Jews’ property by Hinderbach. During his trial lasting several months and involving torture, Paolo resorted to self-mutilation: he tried to cut out his tongue so he would not be asked to speak and he claimed to be possessed by the devil. And thus he was forced to undergo exorcisms. Following the exorcisms, Paolo dialed back his allegations, denied that records had been tampered with but affirmed that much of the obstruction was engineered by the Jews. Paolo de Novara’s trial, with its outlandish claims of Jews’ plots against the officials in Trent, served to confirm the narrative promoted by Hinderbach about undue Jewish influence and the corruption of the bishop of Ventimiglia and others, helping Hinderbach discredit the Jews and their supporters. The trial was meant to serve as evidence to exculpate Bishop Hinderbach of wrongdoing and cast doubt on any evidence marshaled against him.¹²³

Hinderbach was masterful in promoting his side of the story and undermining others, almost at any cost. A key part of his scheme was controlling information. While he was reluctant to give de’ Giudici access to the records and to the incarcerated women, he was more lax about giving his supporters that access. For example, according to Hinderbach’s letters from September 1476, the Franciscan preacher Michele de Carcano (Michele of Milan), charged with preaching about “our new blessed martyr Simon,” was allowed “to see and examine” the trial records and to talk with the Jewish women, who remained imprisoned despite papal orders to release them; Michele was later to act as an advocate for the cause of Simon in Rome.¹²⁴ In October of the same year, Hinderbach also sent copies of the records to Bishop Jacopo Zeno of Padua; in November he mentioned in a letter to Francesco Sansone (or Francesco Nani), the renowned minister general of the Franciscan order, that another preacher, Johannes Petrus, minister of the province of St. Antonio of Padua, “saw and read” the trial records against Jews.¹²⁵ Then at the height of the investigation by the papal commission in Rome in 1477, Wilhelm Rottaler, Hinderbach’s agent at the Roman Curia, requested copies as well.¹²⁶ But in February 1478, as the case in Rome was winding down, when the bishop of Feltre, Hinderbach’s strong supporter, also requested copies, Hinderbach demurred, saying they were too voluminous to be copied and sent out.¹²⁷

Hinderbach and his allies did all they could to use the trial records to promote the cult and defend their case, while impugning the integrity of Battista de’ Giudici’s investigation, the documentation he collected, and any evidence provided by Jews.¹²⁸ For example, the protocols of the trial of Brunetta, Samuel’s wife, who is prominently displayed in later iconography of Simon’s martyrdom (e.g. Fig. 1.2), went missing. Perhaps her trial included something incriminating against the Trentini, because Brunetta is said to have retracted her testimony, and Jews were said to have had the protocols in their hands. Amplifying the suspicion that Hinderbach’s advocates may have destroyed the protocols is the fact that they tried to do everything they could to discount any evidence provided by Jews.¹²⁹

Battista de’ Giudici’s Failed Mission and the Limits of Papal Power

Although the papal envoy secured the (now-lost) sealed records of the first phase of the trial, he was unable to accomplish much else. Frustrated, the bishop of Ventimiglia attached to his letter of September 24, 1475, a copy of his mandate to remind Bishop Hinderbach of the pope’s wishes.¹³⁰ But if de’ Giudici’s letter, written in the presence of Hinderbach’s close ally Approvino, expressed hope and even confidence that the surviving prisoners would soon be released as the pope had requested, in a second letter sent two days later, the tone was more confrontational. It implied that by not releasing the prisoners Hinderbach was disobeying the wishes of both the pope and the duke of Austria.¹³¹ But Hinderbach remained unmoved: he kept the women and children in prison and continued to promote the cult.

Notified about, and perhaps even alarmed by, the obstruction of the Trent officials, on October 10, 1475, Pope Sixtus IV issued a breve to all rulers and officials in Italy prohibiting the veneration of Simon in sermons, paintings, and historical works until Bishop de’ Giudici could determine “the truth of the matter.”¹³² He also ordered the protection of Jews and their property. Two days later, on October 12, the pope sent two additional letters, one addressed to Hinderbach and one to de’ Giudici.¹³³ He exhorted Hinderbach to free the women and children, “whose innocence cannot be doubted.” To de’ Giudici the pope granted full authority, including the power to use excommunication and other ecclesiastical censures and penalties to compel cooperation from officials in Trent. In late October the papal envoy did use these newly articulated powers, threatening Jacob de Sporo, the captain of the city of Trent, with excommunication if the women and children were not released within three days or if they were subjected to torture. Disregarding the threats, on November 3, the podestà de Salis began the trial of the women, subjecting them to torture between November 4 and 6. On November 8, 1475, in response, de’ Giudici excommunicated de Salis.¹³⁴

Despite the excommunication, the women remained in prison, and the torture continued. Not all records of the interrogations seem to have entered the official protocols; a gap exists between November 8 and 17, when Anna, Tobias’s wife, was subjected to torture. On November 18, a physician ruled that Brunetta, Bona, and Dulceta were too sick to be subjected to torture; he was especially worried that Dulceta, suffering from dropsy, might die within days. Yet the next day, the podestà, then officially under excommunication by the papal envoy, ordered Anna, Israel’s widow, to be sent again to the torture chamber.¹³⁵ But Odoricus de Brezio, responsible for sorting out the Jewish loans and debts, intervened and spared her because of Anna’s valuable skills: she knew how to read and was the only one able to decipher Jewish loan ledgers. Not until March 1476 was she interrogated and tortured. Dulceta, as the physician had feared, died less than two months later, on January 15, 1476.

The efforts to release the women failed, despite the plenary powers vested in Bishop de’ Giudici by the pope, the ensuing excommunication of de Salis, and orders to set them free sent directly from the pope.¹³⁶ Hinderbach must have realized there was no mechanism to force him to obey papal orders. The impotence of the papal envoy and his failure to secure the release of the women and children underscored the limits of papal power and influence, something Hinderbach had understood since his time as a student in Vienna, where he embraced conciliarist ideas emerging from the Council of Basel (1431–1445).¹³⁷

In the end, Hinderbach triumphed. His pièce de résistance came in January 1477, when three Jewish women—Bella, who assumed the name Elisabeth; Anna, now Susanna; and Sara, now Clara—converted in a high-profile spectacle, in which Hinderbach participated.¹³⁸ The women were first asked to confirm publicly that their conversion was sincere “free, spontaneous, voluntary, and without coercion, violence, fear, terror, or intimidation.”¹³⁹ Several weeks after the conversion, on Sunday, January 26, 1477, the three women were led to the Church of St. Peter. They knelt before Simon’s corpse and touched his coffin with one hand, and, with the other hand, in a gesture of contrition, performed in the presence of the luminaries of the city, including Hinderbach and crowds of faithful who “came to listen to the word of God,” an act of penance. They confessed to their own and their husbands’ role in killing Simon, “the use of his blood both in food and drink, and also to injuries, derisions, and blasphemies against our Lord Jewish Christ, and his glorious mother Virgin Mary.” Then they asked for the forgiveness of “God, glorious Virgin and his mother Mary, and saint Simon and his parents.”¹⁴⁰ A procession around the church, a celebration, and reception followed; finally, there was a ceremony at the bishop’s residence, Castle Buonconsiglio, where the women were said to have expressed their gratitude to Hinderbach. He permitted them to visit the church daily and bring votive offerings to “the sacred and incorrupt body of the beatus Simon, innocent boy and martyr.”¹⁴¹

Hinderbach wasted no time in informing his allies in Rome about this important development. By early February the news had reached Rome, eliciting a response on February 10, 1477, from the Franciscan preacher Michele de Carcano of Milan, who rejoiced at the news about miracles through which God “manifested glory” of the new martyr, and in particular at the great miracle of the conversion of the Jewish women who had been, the preacher said, “most obstinate in their perfidy.”¹⁴² On February 12, Wilhelm Rottaler, Hinderbach’s agent at the Roman Curia, also reported receiving the news and immediately passing it on to members of the papal commission.¹⁴³ Hinderbach and his allies hoped to use the women’s conversion to thwart Jews’ efforts to release them—after conversion they could no longer be united with Jews; and “to confuse other Jews and their supporters,” who were attempting to stir opposition and spread “nonsense and fabricated lies” over the validity of the trial.¹⁴⁴ Indeed, Hinderbach’s allies did not hide that they saw the women’s conversion and the spectacle of contrition as “corroboration of the trial against the perfidious and impious Jews and the protocols [of the trial].”¹⁴⁵

Conspicuously missing from this spectacle was Brunetta, the only Jewess commemorated in Simonine iconography. Arrested with the men on March 27, 1475, Brunetta was treated differently from the other women from the start. But her interrogation records are missing. A Hebrew letter from 1475 reporting the martyrdom of the men suggests she withstood torture without confessing to anything, but it does not mention her death.¹⁴⁶ Her ability to withstand torture made the Trent officials suspect she might have been bewitched.¹⁴⁷ To counteract the spell, Hinderbach ordered she be washed head to toe with the urine of a virginal boy—a remedy he discovered in Vincent de Beauvais’s Speculum historiale, one of Hinderbach’s favorite books. “Finally, after many attempts,” Hinderbach wrote, Brunetta converted on her deathbed, taking the name Catherina.¹⁴⁸ But, as Anna Esposito has noted, there is room to doubt Hinderbach’s claim.¹⁴⁹ The only evidence of Brunetta’s conversion comes from Hinderbach himself: a marginal note in his copy of Speculum historiale and his own epitaph to Brunetta. As someone truly obsessed with record keeping, the notarial affirmation of anything that would help his cause, and informing his supporters about any helpful developments, Hinderbach was unusually silent about Brunetta. Confusion may have been compounded by the fact that there were two women named Brunetta: one was Samuel’s wife, and the other was Engel’s mother. In October 1477 one Brunetta, Engel’s mother, is said to have died in prison and was ordered buried in a local cemetery. In a note about her death she is still called by her name Brunetta, because she was still known as a Jewess, in contrast to the women who converted and assumed new names.¹⁵⁰ The other Brunetta, Samuel’s wife, seems to have been still alive in December 1477, months after the three other women converted.¹⁵¹ Perhaps in this instance, even Hinderbach understood the limits of public fabrication. Although he may have concocted Brunetta’s conversion in his private notes, he may not have been willing to claim in public a conversion of someone who had not accepted baptism. Others in Trent must have known her true fate. Or, perhaps, Brunetta died after the pope ruled the trial to be legal, and thus her conversion had no legal standing. Perhaps she was the reason for the Jews’ continuous, if futile, efforts to free “Jewish women” even after they had converted. Still, given Hinderbach’s propensity to broadcast news about Jews or Simonine miracles, and Brunetta’s notoriety in Simon’s story, his silence seems telling. Brunetta’s presence in Simonine iconography depicting his death is perhaps another clue suggesting that she never converted (Fig. 2.6).

Years later, in a verse epic written sometime around 1481 and published in 1511, some twenty-five years after Hinderbach’s death, Ubertino Pusculo, one of the poets writing about Simon at Hinderbach’s request, lauded Brunetta’s strength as the only one to “conquer the tortures men are afraid of” without confessing. He described in detail her legendary defiance:

You alone, stripped naked in front of men, resolutely refused to reveal your crimes. Glowing charcoals had already burned your feet, and vile-smelling fumes had driven away the podestà and the rest, when you, fixing your fierce gaze on the man who was scorching your feet with lighted charcoal, called him a butcher! There was no longer any hope of her being conquered by torture, or of any truth being wrung from her lips; she was kept in jail but no longer interrogated, nor having conquered all forms of punishment was any more being inflicted on her.¹⁵²

But “touched by God,” she had a change of heart and converted with the knowledge and approval of Hinderbach; she then died, and her funeral was held with great pomp. If this account were true, the silence of Hinderbach and others at the time is particularly striking.

The question of telling false tales and fabricating evidence in Trent was certainly raised by Battista de’ Giudici, whom the Trentini sought to discredit by casting him from the very beginning as a friend of Jews and then forcing him to assert his anti-Jewish bona fides. For de’ Giudici the affair in Trent was a threat to “the Christian religion.”¹⁵³ Although true miracles were, the papal envoy argued, frequently sent by God to confirm faith, “false” miracles, fabricated through human acts, contribute to “its destruction.” Indeed, Antichrist, he argued, will bring false miracles to throw into question “the true miracles of the apostles, martyrs, and old saints.” But the Church, “founded on the passion of Christ and the blood of the apostles, martyrs, virgins, and confirmed by their miracles, … has no need for the lies of the Trentini,” who defend “their inventions” with force “in total contempt of the apostolic see, and injury to the law.”¹⁵⁴ De’ Giudici was outraged that the officials in Trent and their friends elsewhere had the audacity to question papal authority over the matter, as if “the investigation of truth belonged to temporal lords and not the apostolic see.” The envoy saw an attack on himself as an attack on the pope. The Trent affair was not about “Jewish perfidy,” but about the authority of the Holy See. Not only did the officials in Trent hold in contempt the orders of the pope, “the true vicar of Christ,” but they also permitted such contempt among the people.¹⁵⁵

FIG. 2.6   Broadsheet bound with Johannes Matthias Tiberinus, Passio Beati Simonis pueri Tridentini a p[er]fidis judeis nup[er] occisi. Rome: Bartholomaeus Guldinbeck, 1475 at the Bayerische StaatsBibliothek, Rar. 337. Brunetta is named “Pruneta.”

Law and Procedures

The clash between the bishop of Trent and papal envoy de’ Giudici revealed their different understandings of papal authority and power. It also highlighted legal disagreements within German and Italian legal praxis regarding grounds for prosecution, legal procedures, use of torture, and the standing of witnesses.¹⁵⁶ Indeed, protests about the legality of the trial led to its initial suspension in April 1475 and to papal involvement in the affair later that summer. The disparities between materials provided by de’ Giudici and those provided by Hinderbach and his allies led to the establishment of a commission of cardinals in Rome to investigate the Trent affair and determine if that trial was valid.

Once challenges mounted, Hinderbach, who had for years served as an imperial ambassador to Rome, immediately activated his network of friends to support his cause, and in fact many members of the commission were favorable to him.¹⁵⁷ He also began a letter-writing campaign to support his side of the story and especially to defend the legality of the trial by minimizing the extent of torture used and asserting his power and jurisdiction over the case.¹⁵⁸ For Hinderbach, it was essential that the trial be deemed legal; its legality would confirm Jewish responsibility for Simon’s death and thus support claims of the boy’s martyrdom and his holy status. De’ Giudici’s findings had to be destroyed, his integrity undermined.

For Battista de’ Giudici several key issues emerged during his investigation: the excessive use of torture to force Jews to confess to the crime, the falsification of trial records, and his inability to examine all the witnesses. In his opinion, “Jews were killed” and their property confiscated “against the law.”¹⁵⁹ But beyond the specific questions about the trial, de’ Giudici was also concerned with Hinderbach’s defiance and disobedience of papal orders. Having arrived with a clear mandate from the pope, de’ Giudici claimed to have the authority to investigate matters thoroughly. The Trentini disagreed, arguing, as de’ Giudici would recall later, that “the investigation of their beatus pertained not to the pope but the emperor,” and thus the pope had no authority over the case and “neither should nor could adjudicate” it without offending the emperor.¹⁶⁰ That the Trentini “dared” to make such a claim outraged the bishop of Ventimiglia.¹⁶¹

The question of jurisdiction became central to the judgment regarding the legality of the trial. Jurists in Rome, sympathizing with Hinderbach, seem to have concurred that the pope had limited jurisdiction in Trent and that legal matters there belonged to the secular powers, which were rooted in Trent’s relationship with the emperor and duke of Austria.¹⁶² Indeed de’ Giudici understood this political framework and frequently referred to the duke’s authority.¹⁶³ Yet, having a much more expansive view of papal power, the bishop of Ventimiglia also invoked the authority of the pope in his requests and actions. Hinderbach’s defiance of the pope’s orders was, in de’ Giudici’s view, tantamount to “contempt” of papal authority.¹⁶⁴

Hinderbach strongly disagreed. Writing to the cardinals in Rome, he claimed that the officials in Trent always acted with “obedience and devotion” to the apostolic see.¹⁶⁵ They did not disobey the pope; rather, the pope’s authority simply did not pertain to cases like that in Trent.¹⁶⁶ It was de’ Giudici who abused his power and acted “against the will of our most holy lord” by intervening in temporal powers of the bishop of Trent and inappropriately delegating legal tasks, thus throwing into question the validity of the evidence he collected.¹⁶⁷ With the procedures at Trent under scrutiny, Hinderbach assured the cardinals that the trial was based on “much clear evidence” and, in fact, proceeded “according to sacred canons, civil and canonical norms, statutes and customs of the city of Trent.”¹⁶⁸ The clash over procedure and records revealed the “relationship between the procedure adopted in Trent,” the legal praxis in Italy that was deeply grounded in the Roman law, and legal praxis in the Empire; it also highlighted differences in understanding the jurisdiction over Jews.¹⁶⁹

According to legal historian Diego Quaglioni, the trial in Trent was in accord with the procedures of an inquisitorial criminal trial.¹⁷⁰ To proceed with a criminal case there needed to be evidence of a crime (indicia) and public voice (rumors, fama publica) pointing to a culprit, or notoriety.¹⁷¹ With that in place, the authorities had to begin an investigation, which typically focused on questions framed around the specific allegations and indicia of the crime. There was never a presumption of innocence.¹⁷² In Trent, as Quaglioni has argued, that is what happened. When Simon first disappeared, it was first feared he accidentally drowned in one of the canals. But soon rumors began to circulate that Jews may have kidnapped and killed him. Finally after the body was found under the Jews’ house, the medical examiners ruled that the boy could not have drowned by accident. With public rumors and the conclusions of the medical examiners in place, the authorities had grounds to open up a criminal trial against the Jews. This is also the argument presented to the commission of cardinals by Hinderbach’s supporters.¹⁷³

The flow of the inquisitorial process helps explain why the trial records foreground the early testimonies of Giovanni da Feltre, Margareta Gelbegret, and Seligman (Mayer’s son). Their discussion of hearsay that Jews killed Christian children provided legal support to instigate a formal inquisitorial process against the Jews: it was evidence of fama publica and notoriety.¹⁷⁴ Later, when de’ Giudici was applying more pressure, especially as the trial of women was beginning in November 1476, defensive Bishop Hinderbach would seek to collect historical evidence to substantiate the charges against Jews and judicial action further by sending the Dominican Heinrich of Schlettstett to obtain notarized copies of earlier trials against Jews in the Holy Roman Empire, such as in Ravensburg, Pullendorf, and Endingen, and by citing chronicles, especially, Vincent de Beauvais’s Speculum historiale.¹⁷⁵ These were then to be sent to Rome to support Hinderbach’s side.

But it was the early phase of the trial in 1475 and its representation in the official records that were critical for the subsequent claims of the legality of the procedures. Once the authorities, after examining the body, accepted the idea that Simon did not drown accidentally, but “was kidnapped, subjected to ritual tortures and killed in hatred of Christian faith,” the investigators “had no other goal” but to obtain from the accused the “full and concordant confession of their guilt,” or what they understood as “the truth.”¹⁷⁶ And that “truth” was articulated quite early on by Giovanni Mattia Tiberino.

There were, however, legal issues with these early witnesses. Some had a conflict of interest, having pawned possessions with Trent Jews. Others, like Giovanni da Feltre, the convert imprisoned in Trent for another crime and thus an infamis persona, were not legally qualified to serve as witnesses.¹⁷⁷ Even Hinderbach understood that, flagging the issue in his notes on the protocols of the trial.¹⁷⁸ And most important, despite the claims of the officials in Trent and their advocates in Rome, other than Simon’s body, the hearsay, and these early testimonies allegedly confirming the authorities’ accusations, there were no proofs and no witnesses that Jews had committed a crime. Jews’ confessions were therefore legally necessary, and hence, it was argued, it was legal to use torture.¹⁷⁹

The abuse of torture during the trial was a key point of disagreement. De’ Giudici claimed that official records were stripped of descriptions of the excessive application of torture. But Hinderbach pushed back. Torture applied in Trent was “moderate, and lesser than even that used typically against Christians for less serious crimes,” therefore the confessions were valid.¹⁸⁰ This line of defense was accepted by the jurists in Rome. Giovanni Francesco Pavini concurred with Hinderbach. With sufficient indicia suggesting Jews’ culpability, there was a legal basis for the use of torture and, given the inconsistency of confessions, also for its repetition.¹⁸¹ (Paradoxically, Ubertino Pusculo’s description of Brunetta’s ability to withstand torture confirms de’ Giudici’s claims that excessive torture was indeed applied.¹⁸²)

The issue of the Jews’ confessions under torture and the validity of their condemnation did not disappear from the debates over the legality of the trial. One anonymous jurist close to the bishop of Ventimiglia—most likely, the Italian jurist from Padua, Antonio Capodilista—raised these questions in his legal brief, arguing that Jews were “impiously and unjustly” captured and tortured, since there was no adequate evidence for their arrest, torture, and condemnation.¹⁸³ If the Trentini claimed as proof of their case the fact that Jews ratified their own confessions, the author of this opinion challenged that claim by arguing that, although the accused might confirm a confession made under torture, such a person “cannot be condemned” based on such confession if evidence does not support it. The author questioned especially confessions claiming that Jews killed Christian children to obtain their blood. Those “of sane mind and zealous for justice” would not accept as plausible confessions that “Jews killed Christian with different torments to obtain their blood for use in their Passover matzah.” The Jews’ law, which they observe “with exactitude [ad unguem],” prohibits the use of any blood. Surely, Jews “deny that Christ was the son of God and true Messiah,” but how was it possible to believe that Jews used Christian blood “for the salvation of their souls”? He went on to savage other “ridiculous” claims that Jews use Christian blood, among them that they needed it to contain the Jewish “smell.” It was an absurd idea that “the smell ceases, if it were [even] true that they smelled,” when they “put in their Passover matzah or wine a little blood of a Christian boy.”¹⁸⁴ Finally, far from truth was the claim that Jews used blood in circumcision; no physician had ever heard of it. The whole affair was fabricated. “What is preached about Simon [is] … false and full of lies … intended to cover a crime as is done in parts of Germany,” he wrote alluding to blood accusations against Jews in the Holy Roman Empire.¹⁸⁵ The Jews’ accusers wanted to promote the veneration of a “fetid and putrid corpse.” And that was, he argued quoting Jerome’s commentary on the Epistle to Philemon, an abomination: “If someone said a holy is not holy, or asserted an unholy is holy it is abominable before god, and he who believes a man to be holy who is not holy and joins the same man in fellowship of god, he profanes Christ.”¹⁸⁶ Crucially, Jerome’s proof text for this comment was Proverbs 17:15: “To acquit the guilty and convict the innocent—Both are an abomination to the LORD.” The anonymous author thus concluded that the trial of Jews of Trent was unjust and abominable, once again connecting the validity of the trial to the validity of the cult. While the anonymous Italian jurist, apparently Antonio Capodilista, was surprised about beliefs held about Jews, or legal process, these beliefs were quite common north of the Alps from where Hinderbach hailed.

Hinderbach found Capodilista’s treatise abominable and indeed mocked it as “anti-Christ.”¹⁸⁷ The trial of the Jews, as argued by Hinderbach’s ally Giovanni Francesco Pavini in Rome, and jurists closer to home, such as Giovanni de Giglis and Giovanni Antonio de Vaschetis (Guaschetta), was legal and followed conventional practices from beginning to end.¹⁸⁸ Their opinions rested not just on questions specific to the trial in Trent but also on broader questions regarding the place of Jews in Christian society and law; Pavini even attached to his response on the legality of the trial a treatise on the Jews’ legal status.¹⁸⁹ As Diego Quaglioni has noted, for medieval Christian jurists, Jews presented a “key” legal problem, bringing to the fore the question of the relationship between “divine law, natural law, and civil law, and even between ius commune and ius proprium.”¹⁹⁰ Whereas de’ Giudici and his allies argued that in matters of blood accusations the podestà in Trent had no authority to try the Jews, Giovanni Antonio Guaschetta—who early on in November 1475 had asserted the validity of the first phase of the trial and kept Hinderbach informed about de’ Giudici’s work—affirmed, in 1477, at the height of the work of the commission in Rome, that the podestà did in fact have such authority based on “the statutes, laws, and customs” of Trent.¹⁹¹ According to the statutes, Guaschetta argued, the podestà was obligated to conduct “diligent investigation” in cases of murder, robbery, and forgery, and because Jews were counted among legal residents of Trent—they were, he argued, Tridentinos—“statutes concerning the Tridentinos apply also to Jews living in Trent.” Thus, because the podestà had the authority to try the Tridentinos, he also had jurisdiction over Jews. This followed, Guaschetta argued, ancient Tridentine customs and laws applied to similar crimes in Germany.¹⁹² Moreover, citing Baldo degli Ubaldi’s opinion about jurisdiction over Jews with regard to “human actions,” Guaschetta stressed that Jews were “not only subject to Roman law, but also … to other Tridentine statutes.”¹⁹³ Giovanni Francesco Pavini concurred.¹⁹⁴

But Pavini, whose legal opinion focused on two main issues—defending procedures in Trent, de iure et stilo (of law and method), and discrediting the actions of the papal envoy—went a bit further. In a direct pushback against de’ Giudici’s assertion of papal authority and his view that the Trent officials’ obstruction was “contempt” of the pope, Pavini’s argument to support the city’s jurisdiction over Jews and the trial sought to circumscribe papal authority.¹⁹⁵ He first summarized the mandate Pope Sixtus IV gave the bishop of Ventimiglia to argue that not only was de’ Giudici’s jurisdiction in Trent limited and he, in fact, exceeded it, but that the pope’s jurisdiction was also limited in territories under imperial jurisdiction.¹⁹⁶ The pope had jurisdiction over miracles and determination of sainthood, but de’ Giudici did not use due diligence to investigate that question properly. As for the arrest of Jews and confiscation of their property, that authority belonged to the officials in Trent. Indeed, Pavini offered a legal parallel: the pope had no jurisdiction over Jews passing through “Saracen” territory; only the “[Saracen] emperor” along with a secular judge had it, and because Jews are not baptized, they are not bound by canon law. Thus “the prince of the land” has jurisdiction over Jews in cases of public crimes. And in Trent, “in criminal cases one appeals to secular judges.”¹⁹⁷ Moreover, “the apostolic see did not get involved in similar cases occurring in Paris under the rule of king Philip” nor in cases “in our times in Regensburg and Passau,” Pavini wrote referring to a blood accusation in Regensburg in 1476—a direct outcome of the Trent trial—and the 1478 Passau host desecration, which Hinderbach’s allies were using to strengthen their case in Rome.¹⁹⁸

Pavini even challenged the Jews’ defense that papal bulls issued by Popes Innocent IV and Gregory X, which had been entered into the documentation concerning the Trent affair, protected them against blood accusations.¹⁹⁹ These did not apply, Pavini argued, in this case. Pope Innocent IV reacted against calumnies against Jews that resulted in their persecution without proper procedures, when they were not formally accused, did not confess, and were not convicted. From the text of Innocent’s bull it is “clear” it was intended for “calumnious accusations” and not for legally conducted trials.²⁰⁰ In Pavini’s treatise, grounded in sources and arguments provided by the bishop of Trent, Tiberino’s account also played an important role, because together with the trial records, it provided a basis for Pavini’s summary of “facts.” Moreover, Pavini even sought to substantiate Tiberino’s claims that the blood of the victim flowed in the presence of murderers.²⁰¹ Pavini’s work played an important role in the commission’s decision in Rome; in fact, Hinderbach’s advocate in Rome, Approvino, arranged for it to be printed, paying thirty ducats for three hundred copies.²⁰²

On June 20, 1478, after months of delays, Pope Sixtus IV issued a bull addressing the Trent affair.²⁰³ The succinct document reveals that the pope carefully considered the opinions of both Hinderbach’s circle and the bishop of Ventimiglia. Based on the conclusions of the commission, the pope did rule the trial lawful (processum rite et recte factum); the podestà acted against some Jews, who “were said to have killed inhumanely a Christian infant,” based on public rumors, fama publica—a legal term obligating authorities to investigate a crime.²⁰⁴ In a narrow sense, the trial was ruled legal, but the language, especially the phrase that “Jews were said to have killed,” suggested that the pope did not accept the Jews’ guilt, a necessary element to recognizing Simon’s martyrdom and status as beatus worthy of veneration. Indeed, invoking Canon 62 of the IV Lateran Council, the pope explicitly exhorted Bishop Hinderbach not to allow devotion that “may result in the harm to God, or contempt of the apostolic see” or may be done “in contravention of the canonical sanctions.”²⁰⁵ Pope Sixtus also stood by earlier papal protections of Jews expressed since the medieval period in Sicut Iudaeis, the frequently reissued papal constitution on behalf of Jews. Apparently alluding to the various calls for the expulsion of the Jews and retribution against them in Trent and beyond, the pope enjoined Hinderbach—in words echoing Sicut Iudaeis—to make sure that “no Christian, on the pretext of the foregoing matter [of Simon] or for any other pretext, barring the judgment of an earthly power, should presume to kill, mutilate, wound, or unjustly extort monies from them [the Jews], or prevent them from observing their rites, permitted by law.” Sixtus threatened “those who oppose this decree or rebel against it” with “the weight of ecclesiastical censure and other [pertinent] laws.”²⁰⁶ And finally, the pope again ordered that children of the Jews condemned in Trent be reunited with their baptized mothers. The bull was clearly a compromise, a result of intense lobbying efforts by both the defenders of Jews and Hinderbach’s agents. But it was only a partial victory for Hinderbach. It remained firmly within the medieval tradition of papal policies concerning Jews and did little to advance Hinderbach’s ultimate goal of having Simon recognized a saint.

Jews as Historical Actors

If the medieval cases only provided a glimpse into Jewish actions in the aftermath of anti-Jewish accusations, the Trent affair for the first time documented them in great detail. Jews were hardly passive victims of the affair. Soon after the trial began in late March 1475, Jews from the region activated their networks in Tyrol, as well as in northern Italy, reaching first the court of Duke Sigismund of Austria and then church leaders in Rome, as well as dukes and rulers in other places.²⁰⁷ On May 19, 1475, for example, Gregorius Ems reported to his friend Hinderbach that “many Jews from Padua with a doctor from Treviso” were intervening in Innsbruck on behalf of Trent Jews.²⁰⁸ They were said to spare no “gold or silver” to convince those in power to intercede on behalf of the accused. And they were not without accomplishments. In September 1475, a Jew named Sloman (or Solomon) from Tyrol or Austria received Duke Sigismund’s permission and escort to stay in Trent.²⁰⁹ And when Bishop Battista de’ Giudici of Ventimiglia arrived in the region, Jews from northern Italy, among them Jacob of Riva and Jacob of Brescia, reached him to plead for help.²¹⁰ In Venice, Jews wanted the authorities to prevent preaching about Simon and against Jews, a request granted by the doge of Venice in November 1475.²¹¹

Hinderbach and his allies spun the Jewish interventions as corruption. They portrayed any documented contact with Jews as discrediting for the person with whom Jews met or for the documents produced.²¹² Indeed, Hinderbach claimed Jews offered money to him, the podestà, and the city captain, pleading to liberate those arrested.²¹³ This effort failed, because the Trent officials were not easy to bribe. The most eminent victim of this propaganda was the papal envoy de’ Giudici—slandered from beginning to end as corrupted by Jewish money, he was called odiosus, or odious, and even pseudo-episcopus, a pseudo-bishop.²¹⁴ De’ Giudici had to defend himself by offering his previous preaching against Jews as evidence that he was conscientious in his quest for truth and not easily corruptible.²¹⁵

Although Hinderbach proudly claimed he and his officials did not succumb to Jewish bribes, the issues of corruption and bribery touched him as well, albeit from a different angle. Hinderbach knew very well that interventions were costly and money played a role in the process of making his case; his advocates repeatedly pleaded with him to pay their expenses in Rome. Moreover, implying that Hinderbach was bribing the faithful, Battista de’ Giudici accused the bishop of Trent of distributing alms to promote the cult of Simon.²¹⁶

From the thousands of documents left behind as a result of the trial, including the tendentious and hostile to Jews letters sent by Hinderbach’s informants, the documents produced by Bishop de’ Giudici, the trial records of Paolo de Novara, and the testimonies of women, it is clear that Jews were not without advocates, influence, or the ability to act. The records of Paolo de Novara’s trial, a highly problematic source aimed at undermining de’ Giudici’s claims that trial records sent to Rome had been amended, reveal some mechanisms of communication that Jews seem to have used to get both to those in power and to those in prison in Trent.²¹⁷ Paolo de Novara, the priest who served as a scribe in Trent, knew the Jew Crassino also from Novara, the father of Bona, Engel’s wife. Paolo apparently served as a go-between, passing messages from the imprisoned Jews, especially the women, to the outside world: their relatives and the papal legate. The task was risky; it involved hiding letters in secret locations in Trent and sometimes even consuming them on the spot to destroy the evidence of contacts. To discredit any evidence of malfeasance by the Trentini, the Paolo’s trial records show him acting and speaking against them as a result both of his corruption by Jews and his “possession by the devil.”

The actions by Jews in response to the blood accusation in Trent spurred Hinderbach’s imagination and fears about them. One striking fear, also revealed in Paolo’s trial, was of an purported Jewish plot to poison Hinderbach and other Trent officials, clearly grounded in medieval myths about Jews poisoning wells, which Hinderbach, an avid consumer of books, must have found in history books and chronicles.²¹⁸ More real was Hinderbach’s frustration with and fear of Jewish influence in sites of power that created obstacles to his cause; he was receiving reports of such advocacy as late as the spring of 1478, just before Pope Sixtus IV issued his June 20 bull ruling the trial legal.²¹⁹

In addition to making personal appeals to release Jewish prisoners and exerting continuous efforts to obtain trial records, to counter the Trent accusations, Jews also furnished in their defense medieval imperial privileges and papal bulls of protection.²²⁰ Although these documents, first issued in the aftermath of blood accusations in Fulda and Valréas in the thirteenth century, did not prevent similar accusations from happening again, they clearly had some effect. In Trent, they raised questions about papal authority over blood accusations, forcing Hinderbach and his allies to articulate a legal framework justifying their jurisdiction over the affair and to defend their anti-Jewish accusations in light of earlier papal condemnations. The dissemination of these previous bulls of protection also meant that some of their language was included in Sixtus IV’s June 20 bull.

But direct Jewish voices are largely missing from the mass of documents related to the trial of Jews in Trent, except for one contemporary letter and a qinah, a lamentation.²²¹ There are, admittedly, a few Hebrew letters, which Paolo de Novara carried when he was caught, but they are not related to the trial.²²² The contemporary letter relevant to the trial, probably written soon after the first executions of the Jewish men in June, offers a glimpse into how the affair was perceived by Jews. It contains elements echoing arguments made by Jews’ supporters about excessive torture that “one had not ever heard of,” about the likelihood that Christians who killed Simon dumped his body in the canal, and about Hinderbach’s staging of the trial to confiscate the Jews’ property.²²³ The letter locates the Jewish victims in the tradition of Jewish martyrdom, calling Samuel and Moses “sons of martyrs.”

Also within the Ashkenazi tradition of martyrdom was the qinah, a lamentation emphasizing suffering and martyrdom of the Jewish victim. Only one lamentation about Trent is known to have survived, perhaps because the Jewish community in Trent was too small to survive the affair with no survivors who continued to live as Jews to write and recite such lamentations.²²⁴ In this qinah, the victims, especially old Moses, are pure offerings, “more acceptable to God than a burnt offering.”²²⁵ They are saints on the altar; martyrs who died a martyr’s death, remaining faithful Jews.

This lamentation inverts the meaning of what happened in Trent. It was not Simon who was a martyr and a sacrifice on the altar; it was the Jews. It was not the Jews who committed a crime, but “the bloody city of Trent” that “spilled innocent blood for money.” Trent harbored “great fear that all nations would witness their shame,” because they “tortured an old man on the wheel,” a man who “did not participate in the killing.” For this Trent deserved curses. Only revenge for “the blood of your servants, the Children of Israel” spilled in Trent could be comfort for what took place there.

Given that the Trent affair left such a deep imprint on Christian society and culture, the minimal imprint it left on Jewish culture is surprising.²²⁶ Among Christians it shaped thinking about Jewish culture and practices and helped them imagine and visualize the unimaginable.²²⁷ But the Jewish responses to the trial were nothing extraordinary—action through intervention, diplomacy, and marshaling of previous privileges of protection, on the one hand, and commemoration through poems and lamentations, on the other. This was a typical Ashkenazi response to anti-Jewish libels.

But if the Trent affair nearly disappeared from Jewish memory, it had a profound impact on Jewish history. As the Jews intervening in the affair correctly sensed, the outcome of the affair would have an effect not only on those directly touched by the accusation in Trent but also on those around the world: deeming the accusation valid would not only affirm a new saint but also provide “proof” of Jewish crimes.

And yet, as Battista de’ Giudici astutely noted, the Trent affair was not just about Jews: it was a Christian affair. It was about political authority and influence, a clash between the bishop and the pope. This unusually documented case thus offers a view into politics, sophisticated machinations, diplomacy, and lobbying in late medieval Europe. It highlights the regional understanding of papal powers and their limits. Ruling the trial invalid and fully challenging the cult of Simon would have undermined the bishop’s authority and widened the rift between Trent and Rome—between the “Germans” and the Italians; a rift that would become more acute just a few decades later in the aftermath of the Reformation. Conversely, ignoring the trial and the newly emerging cult would have demonstrated the pope’s powerlessness. The bull of June 20, 1478, sought to prevent that. The trial in Trent was ultimately a German affair caught between German and Italian cultural and legal frameworks, with markedly different impacts and readings of law and facts within these two cultural milieus.²²⁸

In his lifetime Hinderbach did not fully achieve what he had sought. To be sure, he and his officials were cleared of wrongdoing, and the trial was deemed legal; but Simon remained a rogue cult, unrecognized by Rome, with papal policies protecting Jews still in place. In the long term, however, Hinderbach’s efforts would pay off. He displayed a remarkable historical consciousness and, to use Alexandra Walsham’s words from another context, an “impulse to preserve the past for the future.”²²⁹ The bishop of Trent was not merely “safeguarding documentation” of this legal case but was also actively “controlling and organizing knowledge” while marginalizing and “silencing … competing narratives.”²³⁰ It is for this reason that this most-documented case of blood accusation is also one about which we know relatively little beyond what Bishop Hinderbach wanted us to know.