CAMPO DE’ FIORI, ROME, FEBRUARY 17, 1600
If you will not accompany [the Nolan] with fifty or a hundred torches—which shall certainly not be lacking should he come to die in Roman Catholic territory—at least give him one; or, if even this seems too much for you, press upon him a lantern with a tallow candle inside.
—The Ash Wednesday Supper, dialogue 5
For a public execution, it was a strangely rushed affair. In the feeble light of a winter dawn, the parade of officials, inquisitors, and priests could hardly be seen as it pulled away from the prison of Tor di Nona. Not many people were about to see it in any case; shops and market stalls were only beginning to set up for the day. Nothing blocked the procession’s brisk progress down the Via Papale to Campo de’ Fiori, the “Field of Flowers” that served Rome as both marketplace and execution ground.
As tradition demanded, a mule carried the prisoner. Tradition had its roots in practicality; by the time they had been sentenced to death, many of the condemned could no longer walk on their own. Some, indeed, were already dead, garroted before their bodies were ceremonially burned at the stake. But this prisoner, Giordano Bruno, was physically healthy, and when he reached the Campo de’ Fiori, he would be burned alive. There was no other suitable punishment for the heresies he had continued to proclaim during his eight days in Tor di Nona, and for eight previous years in the prisons of the Inquisition. For more than a week, day and night, teams of confessors had tried to change his mind; Dominican, Augustinian, and Franciscan friars succeeded each other in shifts, begging him to save his soul by recanting—because for his body, as they knew, there was no longer any hope. That morning, however, the last team of religious had given up. They handed over their charge once and for all to the black-hooded lay brothers of the Confraternity of Saint John the Beheaded, volunteers who carried out one of their faith’s seven works of mercy by providing last-minute companionship for prisoners condemned to death. After offering Bruno the traditional breakfast of almond biscuits dipped in dense brown Marsala wine, the brothers of Saint John prayed over him as the jailers stopped his tongue with a leather gag and set him on his mule. When the procession began to move down the Via Papale, they held high a painting of the crucifix, hoping to catch the gagged man’s eye with their gold-framed image of the suffering Christ.
The records for that morning—February 17, 1600—report that Bruno “was led by officers of the law to Campo de’ Fiori, and there, stripped naked and tied to a stake, he was burned alive, always accompanied by our company singing the litanies, and the comforters, up to the last, urging him to abandon his obstinacy, with which he finally ended his miserable and unhappy life.”
The inquisitors who ordered this strangely ambivalent execution were afraid of what they were doing, and Bruno knew it. Eight days earlier, when they read him his verdict, an eyewitness reported that “he made no other reply than, in a menacing tone, ‘You may be more afraid to bring that sentence against me than I am to accept it.’” Sixteen hundred was a jubilee year, when pilgrims from all over the Catholic world came to Rome to earn reprieves from purgatory by visiting seven churches on one day, but not every visitor came to collect the indulgence. Protestant troublemakers had already disrupted services several times this Holy Year, crying “Idolatry!” as the priest held up the Host for consecration, or murmuring and jostling among the congregation until completing the Mass became all but impossible. Bruno himself had spent years in Protestant countries, almost always moving at the highest levels of society, among kings, ambassadors, dukes, and electors. No one knew what political connections he might still have or who might object to the sight of him burning alive. His execution had already been aborted once, as an agent for the Duke of Urbino had reported earlier in the week:
Today we thought we would see a most solemn act of justice, and we don’t know why it was stopped; it was a Dominican friar from Nola, a most obstinate heretic, whom they sentenced Wednesday in the house of Cardinal Madruzzi as the author of various terrible opinions which he obstinately continued to maintain, and is still maintaining them. Every day theologians visit him. They say that this friar was in Geneva two years, and then he went on to lecture at Toulouse, and afterward at Lyon, and from thence to England, where they say that his opinions were not at all well received. For that reason he went on to Nuremberg, and from there returning to Italy he was captured, and they say that in Germany he disputed with Cardinal Bellarmine on several occasions, and all told, if God doesn’t help the wretch, he wants to die obstinate and be burned alive.
The agent’s factual information, like most Roman gossip, was not quite correct (Bruno had never met Cardinal Bellarmine in Germany), but he grasped the essentials of the case and the inquisitors’ fears: Bruno’s ideas terrified them as much as his possible political clout, and they were desperate to find an alternative to public immolation. It was a violent age, and the reigning pope, Clement VIII, had approved some horrific executions in the recent past, like the burning of a Scottish heretic in 1595, dutifully reported to the Duke of Urbino by the same agent who would report on Bruno:
The execution was carried out in Campo de’ Fiori, where to terrify him a huge pile of firewood, charcoal, kindling, and more than ten cartloads of pitch had been prepared, and for the occasion a shirt of pitch was made for him that extended from his waist to his feet, black as coal, and then it was put over his naked flesh so that he would not die as quickly, and his life would be consumed in the fire as painfully as possible. He was conducted to the scaffold with a large escort, and made to sit on an iron chair next to the fire, which had already been lit. The usual protest was made on his behalf, as one does for good servants of God, in order to see him repent: that there was still time to obtain grace, but, as soon as he had mounted the iron chair, he threw himself with a great hurry into the burning flames, and buried in them, he died in these earthly flames to spend an eternity in those other flames of hell.
Giordano Bruno’s execution, by contrast, would be quick and quiet, a pageant to be forgotten. There must have been some fear that the show would be seen as barbaric, if one of its witnesses, the Catholic convert Gaspar Schoppe, could rush home to reassure the Lutheran Conrad Rittershausen, his onetime mentor, that it had all been perfectly civil:
This very day prompts me to write, in which Giordano Bruno, because of his heresy, was publicly burned in Campo de’ Fiori before the Theater of Pompey … If you were in Rome now, you would hear from many Italians that a Lutheran had been burned, and thus you would find no small confirmation for your opinion of our savagery.
The ten cardinals who made up the Roman Inquisition lacked Schoppe’s certainty about what they were doing. Bruno’s execution gave public proof that they had failed in their mission, which was not to terrify but to “admonish and persuade.” The guiding spirit of the Inquisition’s endgame, Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, may have enjoyed an earthly reputation as the greatest living theologian, but he had not been able to wield Mother Church’s theology with enough skill to persuade Bruno—himself a trained inquisitor—to change his mind. Neither could Bellarmine claim to have carried out the basic mission of his own order, the Society of Jesus, to “comfort souls.” Instead, the cruelties to which the cardinal (and future saint) had subjected his victims, Bruno included, would haunt him to the grave. So, perhaps, would the narrowness of his own Christian vision; Bellarmine, no less than Bruno, had been fascinated as a young man by the stars and the new astronomy, but he could not imagine those stars, as Bruno did, set within a heaven of infinite vastness, governed by a God who, as Bruno insisted, would one day pardon every creature. Yet somehow the heretic’s ideas moved the inquisitor, so that when Galileo Galilei began to interest the Inquisition in 1616, Bellarmine used all his authority to warn Galileo away from the conflict.
Even today, Bruno’s death still haunts the Catholic Church, which has long since accepted his infinite universe but not his challenge to its own authority. It is not only a matter of Bruno’s own conduct and John Paul II’s refusal to condone it in the year 2000. To make matters still more complicated, Bruno’s inquisitor Cardinal Bellarmine was canonized in 1930; how could an inquiry have gone wrong if guided by a saint? Yet as Robert Bellarmine sensed himself, by proceeding against Giordano Bruno with scrupulous correctness, the Inquisition had made him a martyr.
A martyr to what? That was, and is, the question.