WITTENBERG, PRAGUE, AND HELMSTEDT, 1586–1589
It is immoral to hold an opinion in order to curry another’s favor; mercenary, servile, and against the dignity of human liberty to yield and submit.
—One Hundred and Twenty Articles Against Mathematicians and Philosophers
The bracing weather and northern light of Upper Saxony could not have made a stronger contrast with the “benign heaven” of Giordano Bruno’s youth. The landscape around Naples had been shaped by subterranean fires, a chain of volcanic cones and craters, most of them eroded into jagged, precipitous crags. Germany was shaped by water, by rivers and streams snaking through gently rolling hills. Sprawling, neat half-timbered houses, barns, brooks, and fields emerged from the dense German woods that in their time had swallowed up whole Roman legions. The slopes above the Rhine near Mainz and Wiesbaden may have been famous for their vineyards, but Wittenberg was so far north that it could brew only beer. And, as always, there was an Italian in place, someone afflicted by the same wanderlust as Marco Polo, Christopher Columbus, Amerigo Vespucci, and Father Matteo Ricci, the Italian Jesuit who had just arrived in those days in China and would end his days as a mandarin in Beijing. In Wittenberg, the wandering Italian was a Protestant lawyer named Alberico Gentili.
Exiled from Italy because of his beliefs, Gentili had come to Oxford in 1580, where, with the help of a recommendation from the Earl of Leicester, the university’s chancellor, he secured a position lecturing in civil law at St. John’s College. He had heard Bruno’s lectures and was unimpressed: “I happen to have heard the most false, absurd, and ridiculous things from the greatest of men … of a moon that is a world with many cities and mountains, that the earth moves, that other elements stand still, and countless similar things.” Despite his high connections in Elizabeth’s court, Gentili could tell his own tales of Oxford’s hostility; in 1585, when he mentioned his hopes to succeed to the highest position on the law faculty, Regius Professor, his English colleagues (who were also his rivals for the post) accused him of “Italian levity.” Gentili then threatened to leave England altogether, at least until Francis Walsingham secured him a temporary mission as secretary to the queen’s ambassador to Saxony, Giorgio Pallavicino—the plan was to remove Gentili for a time until the situation at Oxford had settled. In Pallavicino’s entourage, Gentili had arrived in Wittenberg in the summer of 1586, not long before Bruno. It was long enough, however, for the famous Italian jurist to use his influence on Bruno’s behalf, a sign that he had changed his mind about the Nolan since their last encounter in 1583—the six Italian dialogues and three new Latin works that Bruno had written in the ensuing three years may have improved his opinion about the little philosopher. Gentili’s own story had a happy ending: he would return to Oxford the following year as Regius Professor of Civil Law, his ambition fulfilled.
Bruno’s story had taken a happier turn as well. He responded to his German colleagues and their hospitality with unusual warmth. His admiration for German philosophers began with Nicolaus Cusanus and continued with Copernicus (whom he considered a German rather than a Pole), but he was no less impressed by the openness of his colleagues at Wittenberg. His lectures at the university concentrated, in standard fashion, on readings from Aristotle. For the first time in his career, apparently, he presented a course on rhetoric. Rhetoric provided Bruno with a perfect pretext to introduce the art of memory but also to acquaint his Protestant students with the refinements of public speaking that he had learned himself as a Dominican preacher in Naples. His own research concentrated on natural philosophy, and in the process he conceived a wary respect for the Swiss doctor and alchemist Paracelsus. He also gathered a coterie of students, many of whom would become serious professional scholars, including the physician Hieronymus Besler.
Bruno’s gratitude to his new colleagues suffuses the preface to his next book, The Llullian Combinatory Lamp, printed in Wittenberg in 1587. He planned the work as the first of a series of Lamps, each one meant to shed light on a different aspect of the Nolan philosophy, and as he often did, he began with the secure terrain of his own art of memory. Despite his love for wild Neapolitan rhetoric, the tone he adopted to address his German colleagues was unusually positive and unusually sober. The professors of Wittenberg must have provided a striking—and welcome—contrast to the xenophobic mockery he had met in England, and he thanked them with rare humility:
On behalf of such a university, the foremost in spacious, august, powerful Germany, the highest praises should be raised, where free and welcome access and residence is open, not only to students, but also, according to their talents, to professors from all of Europe (which is the sole mother and preserver of all the disciplines). Certainly in my own case, you received me from the beginning with such humanity, and kept me for a year with such hospitality, and have with such benevolence included me as your friend and colleague, so that anything could happen except that I should feel myself a stranger in your house … You took me in, accepted me, and have treated me kindly up to this very day, a man of no reputation among you for fame or worth, a refugee from the French wars, supported by no prince’s recommendation, distinguished by no exterior signs (such as the crowd is wont to demand) … Thus (as is only right for the Athens of Germany), let me recognize what is truly a university.
After The Llullian Combinatory Lamp came a commentary on Aristotle, On the Progress and Hunter’s Lamp of the Logicians, and The Lamp of Thirty Statues, a work on memory that he decided not to publish for the time being. (Preserved in two contemporary manuscript copies, one with Bruno’s own notes, it was finally published for the first time in the nineteenth century.) If the Nolan philosopher seemed to be moving back to the subjects that had first captured his interest as a young scholar, he was doing so with the maturity of an experienced professor, a maturity that showed up both in his relentless emphasis on ever clearer methods of presentation and in genuine, if not entirely successful, attempts to tone down his combative personality, both in public and in print.
Bruno’s idyll in Wittenberg lasted almost two years, and then, once again, the Wheel of Fortune began to move. Like most of the tiny states that made up Germany, Wittenberg was governed by a duke, whose privileges included electing the Holy Roman emperor (although generations of electors had simply chosen successive members of the Habsburg family). The city’s moderate Lutheran politics had long reflected the convictions of Duke Augustus I, whose policies had made the University of Wittenberg into the “Athens of Germany,” as Bruno described it. Augustus, however, died in 1586, shortly after Bruno’s arrival. His son, Christian I, lacked his father’s political skill; more ominously for the university’s faculty, he preferred Calvin to Luther, and strictness to leniency. He began to pressure the Lutheran professors to change their creed. In 1587, Polycarp Leyser, one of the university’s most illustrious professors, left the University of Wittenberg to head the Lutheran church of Braunschweig, complaining of persecution for his beliefs. Soon many of Bruno’s closest colleagues admitted to feeling the same pressures as Leyser. As a diplomat of the English embassy, Alberico Gentili was relatively secure, but he soon returned to Anglican Oxford and his long-awaited Regius professorship.
Bruno knew that it was only a matter of time before someone unearthed his own history with the Calvinists, and so he decided to act on a tip. A friend, Nicodemus Frischlin, had passed through Wittenberg in 1587, bragging about earning a salary of three hundred talers a year in Prague, paid out by the king of Bohemia, Rudolf II. The Habsburg ruler of Austria, Hungary, Bohemia, and, nominally, parts of Germany, Rudolf nurtured passionate interests in astrology, magic, alchemy, and the arts, and had gathered a remarkable group of scholars and artists around him. He would eventually lure Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler to serve as his court mathematicians, but he had already attracted Tycho’s sister Sophie, a superb mathematician in her own right, and her alchemist husband, Erik Lange. Rudolf’s galleries included works by the fanciful Italian painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo, who painted strange images of people made from assemblages of fruit, grain, or fish, and the German Bartolomäus Spranger, whose erotic mythological allegories drew from Albrecht Dürer and from the stylish Florentines who had dominated Italian art since the mid-sixteenth century.
Educated as a strict Catholic in the Spanish court of his great-uncle Philip II, Rudolf tried with indifferent success to impose a Catholic regime in Prague, hindered by a largely Calvinist aristocracy in Bohemia and Lutherans in Germany and parts of Austria, as well as the city’s fifteen thousand Jews, the second-largest Jewish community in Europe (after Salonica). His own antipathy to the Jesuits further hampered his efforts to create a Catholic state; as a result, the twice-excommunicated Bruno could hope, like Prague’s other scholars, to work relatively undisturbed.
Before he left Wittenberg, on March 8, 1588, Bruno delivered a heartfelt farewell speech to his colleagues, the Valedictory Oration. It was both an expression of thanks and a forceful plea in favor of the society that Duke Augustus and his moderate Lutheran creed had managed to create. Bruno used the ancient Greek myth of the Judgment of Paris to describe the pursuit of philosophy that had led him to the north of Germany. The story began with the goddess Strife throwing a golden apple among the gods of Olympus, with the inscription “To the Fairest.” Predictably, an argument erupted, with Juno, Venus, and Minerva each claiming her right to the apple. Finally the gods decided to appeal to a mortal judge, Paris, the handsome prince of Troy. Each goddess offered the young man a bribe for his vote: Juno promised power, Minerva wisdom, and Venus the most beautiful woman in the world. Never distinguished for his intellect, Paris chose Venus, and was soon packing off for Sparta to abduct that most beautiful woman, Helen of Sparta, and turn her into Helen of Troy—at least until her husband and an expedition of a thousand Greek ships set sail to take her back.
Bruno had already used the myth of the Judgment of Paris before, in his Heroic Frenzies, to show that philosophy participated in all three kinds of beauty and granted all three gifts:
Venus, third heaven’s goddess and the mother
Of the blind archer, tamer of every heart,
And she who had the Jovial head as father,
And haughty Juno, Jupiter’s counterpart,
Call forth the Trojan shepherd to advise
Which beauty should receive the golden prize.
And yet if my own goddess were so tested
Then Venus, Pallas, Juno would be bested.
For pretty limbs the measure
Is Cypria; Minerva for the mind;
For Saturn’s daughter, beauty’s in the shine
Of lofty rank, the Thunderer’s chief pleasure.
But she wins for all three:
Beauty, intelligence, and majesty.
In Wittenberg, however, Bruno’s oration moved swiftly from classical myth to Scripture. He quoted the Bible to show all the reasons for which he, unlike Paris, had chosen Minerva and wisdom as the fairest of goddesses. Ironically, he chose a biblical book, the Wisdom of Solomon, that most Protestants had rejected as apocryphal:
Hear Solomon: And I preferred her before kingdoms and thrones, and esteemed riches nothing in comparison of her. Neither did I compare unto her any precious stone: for all gold in comparison of her, is as a little sand, and silver in respect to her shall be counted as clay. I loved her above health and beauty, and chose to have her instead of light: for her light cannot be put out … Her have I loved, and have sought her out from my youth, and have desired to take for my spouse, and I became a lover of her beauty.
Bruno himself extended the biblical image to describe the University of Wittenberg as a house of wisdom, enumerating each of the liberal arts taught under its aegis, and then describing his own journey toward Saxony as a pilgrimage:
I came myself among many others to see this house of wisdom, burning with ardor to see this Minerva, for whom I was not ashamed to suffer poverty, envy, and the hatred of my own people, curses, ingratitude of those I wanted to benefit, and benefited, the effects of extreme barbarism and sordid greed; from those who owed me love, service, and honor, accusations, slanders, insults, even infamy … but for her it has been no shame to suffer labor, pain, exile, because in laboring I improved, in suffering I became experienced, in exile I learned, for I found daily rest in brief labor, immense joy in slight pain, and a broad homeland in my narrow exile.
Soon afterward, the broad homeland of his narrow exile had expanded its horizons into the hills of Bohemia. After the imposing but spare Gothic architecture of Saxony, Prague was a blaze of ornament, with its forests of Gothic spires and gold leaf gleaming in the sunlight, and its great ornate cathedral dedicated to Saint Vitus, a figure familiar to Bruno from his youth in the Kingdom of Naples, where the saint’s famous dance preserved the remnants of an ancient Greek orgiastic cult. But Bruno soon discovered that his friend Frischlin had exaggerated the amount of easy money to be earned in “golden Prague.” Not all the emperor’s choices for intellectual companionship were as inspired as Kepler, Tycho, and Arcimboldo; Rudolf had a weakness for charlatans and showmen as well as philosophers and artists. To be sure, he had turned a skeptical eye on the English scholar John Dee and his oleaginous assistant Edward Kelley, who had arrived at the end of a long journey from England in 1587. (Dee may have seen Bruno debate with John Underhill at Oxford in 1583 during the visit of the Polish prince Albert Laski.) Like Bruno, Dee was interested in mathematics, but he had become still more interested in probing the secrets of the universe by making direct contact with the supernatural world. Unable to make those contacts himself, he had hired a series of scryers, or crystal gazers, to act as his mediums. Of these characters, Kelley was by far the most gifted; he had introduced Dee to a series of angels, from the archangels Uriel and Michael to a mischievous imp named Madimi, who had revealed the course of current political events and dictated the elements of their angelic language. The two had followed Laski to Poland in 1583, proceeding on to Prague, with wives and children in tow, so that Dee could bring the emperor Rudolf an angelic command to repent of his sins. By the time Bruno arrived in the city, Dee and Kelley had been banished to the countryside, where they were quarreling fiercely: Kelley had convinced Dee that the angels were commanding them to share their wives.
Rudolf was not always so suspicious, but then most of the alchemists, kabbalists, and astrologers who flocked to his court were more circumspect than Dee had been. Often the emperor withdrew from his state responsibilities into conclaves with scholars and magicians. He hoped to construct an obelisk that would call down the power of the stars, and would shortly collaborate with a local rabbi to summon a golem, a spirit—which seems to have had mechanical components as well. Rudolf liked the concreteness of alchemical alembics, the traditional astronomical paraphernalia of astrolabes and sextants, and the giant instruments that Tycho Brahe was building on his island observatory in the Danish strait. In fact, Rudolf liked objects of every kind, and collected them with princely avidity: marvels of nature, monstrous creatures, gems, stone inlays, minerals, and lathe-turned ivory pinnacles (he would eventually be tutored himself in this art by the Nuremberg turner Peter Zick). In 1606, Rudolf’s siblings would finally have him declared a madman and pass control of the Holy Roman Empire to his younger brother Matthias.
Bruno made his approach to the eccentric emperor through the Spanish ambassador, Don Guillén de Haro de San Clemente. Still, after all these years, Bruno counted as a citizen of Naples, for whom San Clemente was his official representative in Bohemia. As a calling card, he dedicated a short book to the diplomat, On the Scrutiny of Species and the Combinatory Lamp of Ramon Llull. It was another in his series of Lamps—in fact, he recycled literal pages, and most of the title, of one of his Wittenberg Lamps, The Llullian Combinatory Lamp, for this new publication. His letter of dedication made certain to emphasize the Catalan heritage that San Clemente shared with Llull, and the tribute worked well enough to obtain the Nolan philosopher an audience with Rudolf. Bruno must have hoped to impress the emperor on that occasion with his more intense recent interests, which included climate, the atmosphere, the microstructure of the universe, and the way that profound study of these subjects would require a new kind of mathematics. He dedicated his next book to Rudolf, with a polemical title: One Hundred and Twenty Articles Against Mathematicians and Philosophers. The letter of dedication was a striking document in itself, with its bleak account of the wreck that religious war had made of Europe, Bruno’s expressed hopes that the Holy Roman emperor could help to set the turmoil right, and his profession of a religion beyond controversy:
It happens that, against every reason, state, and nature, human law and consequently the true order of Almighty God instilled in all things, the bonds of nature lie unbound, and by the suggestion of misanthropic spirits and the ministry of hell’s Furies (who fan the flames among nations rather than bringing peace, and insert the sword of dissent between those who are most closely joined, selling themselves as Mercurys descended from heaven among their tricks and their many pretenses), it has come to the point that humanity quarrels most of all with itself, and is more contested by itself than by any other living creature, and that law of love that is spread far and wide lies everywhere neglected, which derives not from some evil demon but certainly from God the father of all things, so that it is in harmony with all nature, and teaches a general philanthropy by which we love even our enemies, lest we become like brutes and barbarians, and are transformed into his image who makes his sun rise over good and bad, and pours out a rain of grace upon the just and the unjust. This is the religion that I observe, which is without controversy and beyond all dispute, whether of the spirit’s inclination or the principle of ancestral or national custom.
As the One Hundred and Twenty Articles left the press in Prague, a sudden storm off the coast of France descended on Philip II’s fleet, the Invincible Armada, launched to strike a mortal blow against Queen Elizabeth and her Protestant regime. Instead, it was the Catholic fleet that sank, opening the world to the British naval power, British colonialism, and British trade.
For his book, in the meantime, Rudolf paid Giordano Bruno three hundred talers. It was exactly the amount he had offered to Bruno’s friend Nicodemus Frischlin, but in Frischlin’s case the talers represented a salary; for the Nolan philosopher they were a onetime payment with no promise of any further support, and they were a terrible disappointment. On the other hand, he had offered the emperor a work that was singularly difficult to interpret. It began by presenting the elements of geometry and ended with a series of enigmatic woodcuts, most of them geometric designs with strange names like “The Ray of Thoth,” “Mirror of Magicians,” some pictures of objects—a snake labeled “Prometheus,” a lute called “Mother of Life”—and many illustrations with no label at all. Bruno was still trying to find a way to analyze the infinite universe. The art of memory gave him a way to obtain very large numbers; geometry gave him a way to describe infinitesimals. He needed both infinitely large numbers and infinitely small intervals to describe the actions of the universe, and the One Hundred and Twenty Articles tried to link all these ideas into a single coherent system. The effort was only partially successful, but on another front Bruno expressed himself with unprecedented clarity.
His letter of dedication to the emperor Rudolf links the liberal arts to “the dignity of human liberty,” a reminder that the root underlying both words is liber, the Latin word for “free”:
As for the liberal arts, may I be spared habits of belief and the traditions of teachers or parents, along with that common sense that (in my judgment) convinces us, many times and in many ways, to deceive and circle around the point, so that I shall never make any philosophical pronouncement that is bold or unreasoned … It is immoral to hold an opinion in order to curry another’s favor; mercenary, servile, and against the dignity of human liberty to yield and submit; supremely stupid to believe as a matter of habit; irrational to decide according to the majority opinion, as if the number of sages exceeded the infinite number of fools … Endowed with the eyes of sense and intelligence by the bounty of Almighty God, and therefore confirmed as judge and jury in the matter, I would be ungrateful and insane, unworthy of that participation in light, if I were to act as agent and champion for someone else, seeing, perceiving, and judging by another’s lights.
It was a remarkable set of assertions to make to an emperor. Machiavelli’s Prince may have advised princes to shun flatterers, but few monarchs have ever followed Machiavelli’s advice, including the Holy Roman emperor Rudolf II. As the autumn leaves began to turn, marking the start of another academic year, Bruno packed his trunk and headed back to Germany, to Tübingen, a beautiful little city set within the forests of the Swabian Alps. By November 17, 1588, he had been inscribed in the University of Tübingen’s books as “some Italian” (Italus quidam), forbidden to give public lectures, granted permission to lecture privately, and told that if he simply moved on altogether he would be given a bit of money “for humanitarian purposes.” Four days later, Martin Crusius, the school’s professor of rhetoric, recalled: “On November 21, Signor Giordano Bruno, Italian of Nola (who was teaching privately at Wittenberg), told me that because Frischlin bragged about having received three hundred talers a year from the emperor, he had believed him, and gone to Prague in hopes of receiving the same treatment from the emperor, but to no avail.”
By January 1589, the “Italian of Nola” had returned to Saxony, this time to the Lutheran city of Helmstedt, whose ruler, Julius, Duke of Braunschweig and Lüneburg, had lent his name and his Lutheran leanings to the local university, the Academia Julia (unfortunately for Bruno, the Academia’s beautifully airy sixteenth-century lecture hall was built just after he left). Helmstedt is not far from Wittenberg, and soon Bruno’s student Hieronymus Besler came to join him. Besler’s own interest in magic prompted Bruno to draw up outlines for several courses on the subject, as we can see from a manuscript (made up of several different works bound together at a later date) now preserved in the National Library of Moscow. Most of these texts are in Besler’s handwriting, with marginal comments and some brief passages by Bruno and several pages by another, unknown, copyist. The papers, their arrangement, and their meaning are not easy to sort out, for they show Bruno’s thought, never simple, as it has been filtered through Besler, a scholar with his own share of complex ideas. They may be lecture notes, they may be the prospectus for a book, they may be both. It is equally difficult to assess their importance as a record of Bruno’s thought, although the fact that they were never published may indicate that Bruno regarded his other works in progress as more urgent.
The very meaning of magic itself is not easy to define in these papers. On Mathematical Magic sets out a general outline of the principles on which magic depends:
God flows into the angels, the angels into the heavenly bodies, the heavenly bodies into the elements, the elements into compounds, compounds into the senses, the senses into the spirit, the spirit into the living creature [Bruno uses the word “animal”]; the living creature ascends through the spirit to sense, through sense to compounds, through compounds to elements, through elements to the heavens, through them into the demons and angels, through them to God or into divine operations. Thus the descent of God or from God is through the world to the living creature; the living creature’s ascent is through the world to God.
The next paragraphs of On Mathematical Magic explicitly mention both Plato and the Hebrew Kabbalah as ways to understand this transit back and forth between God and the world, both God’s descent into living creatures and living creatures’ ascent toward God. Bruno had already described the experience of the philosopher-lovers in The Heroic Frenzies as a similar meeting between divine emanation and human aspiration.
I, for the exaltation of my goal
Though once the least of men, reach godly height …
And I (with thanks to Love)
Change from inferior form to a god above.
The first paragraph of On Mathematical Magic is one of the only places that Bruno mentions angels. His heavens are usually filled to bursting instead with stars and suns and earths, those great animals of the firmament, far greater than the demons and messengers of traditional Christian theology. This is one of many clues that On Mathematical Magic is meant to lay out a conventional course of study rather than marking a new, magical stage in the Nolan philosophy. Magic had always been a part of his “natural and physical discourse,” but that discourse was, pointedly, natural and physical, and it depended absolutely on adjusting to the realities of the infinite universe. As a result, Bruno’s definition of magic brought him closer to Tycho Brahe’s observatory than to John Dee’s conversations with angels. When we read another of his magical works, On Bonds in General, it is important to remember that modern chemists use this same term to describe the pull of one atom on another within a molecule.
At the same time that Hieronymus Besler was drafting the magical works that would interest him for the rest of his own career, another student of Bruno’s was at work on reading Paracelsus. That unnamed student’s marginal notes are still preserved in a copy of Paracelsus in the library at Wolfenbüttel, where many of the books from the Academia Julia of Helmstedt eventually ended up, and on occasion they sound remarkably like his teacher:
Whoever comes across this book should prepare his mind for understanding; nor should he defame perversely and furiously by bold, hasty judgment what cannot be grasped by a first look. Let him imitate the alchemists who finally in their seventh operation obtain gold or gems. For here, too, on the seventh reading the reader will soberly perceive the author’s intentions and praise them, just as assayers of goods let the needle of their judgment waver until it finds its balance … There is nothing absurd, nothing obscure, nothing impious in this book, except to mules and asses … For in this book the true and certain wisdom is described … And there is nothing doubtful. Whoever arrogantly and disdainfully spurns this deep philosophy knows little or nothing, or else maliciously and willfully fights the truth …
Don’t miss the preface, reader.
Many of the magical operations that Bruno describes, especially those that fall under the category of “Natural Magic,” come closer to scientific experiments than they do to the scrying and incantations by which John Dee’s assistants called up angels. Bruno did retain a magician’s attachment to signs and seals, but he associated these images with using his art of memory, which, in an age before computers, was the most massive and reliable device available for storing information. But he must also have regarded his memory as capable of greater feats than the simple retrieval of facts. In one enigmatic passage of On Mathematical Magic, he claims that the signs and seals of that art can be used to act “against nature”:
The things that seem appropriate to this art are such that they can be seen in action in natural actions; that is, signs, notes, characters, and seals, in which it is possible, as seems appropriate, to act outside nature, above nature, and, if the business requires it, against nature.
He spent most of his time, however, trying to convince the rest of the world that nature itself was larger and more complex than they had ever imagined.
In May, Duke Julius died, and Bruno offered a funeral oration in his honor as a way of making himself known to a larger public in Helmstedt; to guarantee its effect, he published the text of this Consolatory Oration with a local printer. Again, the theme of wandering and exile is prominent:
This supreme concern and anxious care trouble me; I greatly fear that someone … will misinterpret what an obscure foreigner, whose purpose among you is unclear, should of my own volition, recognized by no one (as it seems) or encouraged to intrude on your mourning …
Yet intrude he must, Bruno insists, for he could not be called a lover of the arts if he did not praise Julius and the Academia Julia, where no lover of wisdom is made to feel unwelcome.
As an added flourish for his German audience, Bruno added a frontal attack on the Catholic Church, taking up the imagery of a redesigned heaven from his Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast to depict a firmament inscribed with the virtues of Duke Julius. This time, however, the Triumphant Beast is not some generic embodiment of vice but the pope in person, Sixtus V incarnate as the head of the Gorgon Medusa:
That severed head of the Gorgon, in which snakes are implanted in place of hair, is the manifestation of the perverse tyranny of the pope, whose blasphemous tongues, more numerous than the hairs of her head, assist and administer, every one of them, against God, Nature, and humanity, who infect the world for the worst with their poison of ignorance and depravity, which we see cut off and weeded out by your virtue in these regions. That diamond-hard sword, red with the slaughter of the monster, is the constancy of an invincible mind, by which you slew that horrible beast.
The speech apparently pleased the new duke, Heinrich Julius, who continued to support Bruno just as his father had done. But in other ways, history in Saxony began to repeat itself. After his father’s death, Heinrich Julius proved powerless against the wranglings for power of Helmstedt’s head Lutheran pastor, Gilbert Voët, who took a hard line against dissent of any kind, and against Bruno in particular. For reasons that are no longer entirely clear (and seem to have included intense personal dislike), Voët subjected the Nolan to a public writ of excommunication—remarkably, he charged Bruno with harboring Calvinist beliefs.
To counteract the harsh judgments of his head pastor, Duke Heinrich Julius received Bruno and Besler at his riverside palace in Wolfenbüttel, a stately little classical building whose rows of wooden columns quaintly mimic ancient marble. The visit was more than symbolic; on the same occasion, Heinrich Julius also gave Bruno a gift of forty florins, obviously aware that the Nolan was planning to resume his travels. Bruno and Besler discussed a transfer to Magdeburg, where they could stay with Besler’s uncle, but from Bruno’s own standpoint the most promising destination seemed to be Frankfurt, with its book fair, its publishers, and its staunch independence of any imposed creed—the printers and the fair thrived on Frankfurt’s policy of tolerance. For once, Bruno felt a stronger need to be near a publisher than a university; since his days in England, he had been writing a large work on the structure of the universe, and he was nearly ready to see it through the press. The Frankfurt book fairs provided an incomparable market for any writer, but especially for one who needed money. To Frankfurt he went at last, in the spring of 1589.