As America’s mental courage is so indebted, above all current lands and peoples, to the noble army of old-world martyrs past, how incumbent on us that we clear those martyrs’ lives and names, and hold them up for reverent admiration as well as beacons. And typical of this and standing for it and all perhaps, Giordano Bruno may well be put, today and to come, in our New World’s thank-fulest heart and memory.
—Walt Whitman
CARDINAL SEVERINA WAS keen on murder and mutilation. When he heard of the massacre of the Parisian Huguenots in 1572, he called it “a famous and a very joyous day,” and when he was not scheming for promotion in Rome, he traveled Italy persecuting entire communities, torturing and killing. But initially at least, he could not bully the Venetians. In response to the news from Venice that Bruno’s trial had ended, he called for a Congregation of the Roman Inquisition, which, as number two in the Vatican, he would chair.
The Congregation met on September 12, 1592, and it quickly decided to do its utmost to persuade Venice to release the prisoner into its hands; Bruno was a self-confessed heretic who sought to establish a rival theology to that of Rome and must be dealt with under ecclesiastic law overseen by the Holy Office itself. A letter was prepared and sent to the Venetian collegio in which Severina asked for Bruno the heretic to be handed over to the reverend governor of Ancona, who would escort the prisoner under guard to Rome.1 The letter arrived in Venice on September 17 and was read before the Venetian Inquisition by the state assessor, Thomas Morosini.
It came as little surprise, but the Venetian Inquisitors continued to act with caution. They knew they could not extradite Bruno without the official and personal sanction of the doge and were aware of the politically sensitive nature of the situation. So they waited for the next post from Rome, and several days later a second, more insistent letter arrived. After this was read to the Sacred Tribunal of the Inquisition on September 28, a delegation consisting of a representative of Father Gabrielle of Saluzzo and Thomas Morosini then met with the doge, Pasquale Cicogna, who was accompanied by the governing council in a collegio dei savii (a cabinet meeting of the Venetian Republic). The demands from Rome were reported and the Father Inquisitor explained the details of the case.
“Bruno,” he declared, “…is no simple heretic, but a leader of heretics, an organizer and rebel. He has consorted with Protestants, he is an apostate monk who has openly praised the heretic queen Elizabeth of England and has written occult works that attempt to undermine the sanctity of the Church. I urge the council to act with all haste in this matter. We have a boat ready to transport the prisoner immediately if you approve of this action.”
But Pasquale Cicogna was unmoved by the Father Inquisitor’s statement. In no mood to be told what to do by the pope, he flatly refused to be rushed into a decision.
“I will give the matter due consideration,” he replied firmly, and as the representatives of the Inquisition left, he pointedly turned his attention to other matters.2
Like other recent doges, Cicogna had watched with alarm as the Vatican, still recoiling from the Reformation, had made renewed efforts to reforge the temporal power of the Church as well as to bolster its spiritual monopoly. Recent popes had poured money and resources into military conquests and had acquired valuable new territory. Admittedly, Rome was at that moment an ally of Venice, but politics being the way they were in the Peninsula, this could change at any moment, almost without warning. Cicogna knew he had to tread a fine line, to act with diplomacy but to retain national honor.
The afternoon of his meeting with the council, the Father Inquisitor returned to the chamber and asked if the council had reached a decision about the heretic. It had not, the matter being a grave one, and with other pressing government business to deal with, the council and the doge had deferred any further discussion of the matter until a more appropriate time.3
More days passed and the Inquisitors heard nothing from the council, but behind the scenes there were clandestine moves concerning the fate of Giordano Bruno. On October 10, a letter dated October 7 was received in Rome by the Venetian ambassador, Luigi Donato, declaring that the papal request concerning Giordano Bruno could not be complied with, as it would infringe upon the rights of the Venetian Inquisition and establish an unacceptable precedent. It concluded with a request that the ambassador should convey this news with his compliments to the Papal Office.4 Donato replied the same day and stated that he would do all he could to pass this message on with due diplomacy and that if there was to be any argument, he would deal with the matter as best he could.5
It is clear from this that the council decided to use the Venetian Inquisition as a buffer, to pass the responsibility for the decision on to it rather than to involve the state in a political wrangle over the heretic imprisoned in the city. And at first this seems to have worked; the Venetian government heard nothing more on the matter of Bruno for a full three months, during which the prisoner remained in isolation, ostensibly ignored.
Then, three days before Christmas, 1592, the affair resurfaced. The apostolic nuncio spoke again at a private meeting of the Venetian Inquisition and repeated the charges brought against Bruno. He pointed out that the man was not a Venetian but a Neapolitan and had been charged with heresy in both Naples and Rome many years earlier. He added that many other cases of heresy had been referred from the Venetian court to the Holy Roman Tribunal during recent years and that it should be remembered that the Roman court was the most senior of the ecclesiastical authorities. He reinforced his argument by reiterating the vile nature of Bruno’s crimes and declaring that although the Venetian authorities could be expected to deal comfortably with general everyday processes, Bruno’s was such a serious case it had to be dealt with by none other than the Holy Office itself.
On that day, Donato returned to Venice with a report of his meeting with the pope. According to the ambassador, Clement had been happy to let Venice deal with Bruno, but Severina had intervened personally and forcefully. It was he who had dispatched the nuncio to speak again with the Venetian Inquisition and to once more raise the matter with the doge and his council.6 Hearing this, the nuncio was recalled and told curtly that the collegio dei savii would in due course confer and that it would give the request of His Holiness every consideration. This response was then immediately passed on to an impatient Cardinal Severina in Rome.
By this point, it was becoming obvious to the doge and his council that the irritating problem of Giordano Bruno was simply not going to fade away; a politically expedient solution would have to be found. But what were they to do? On the one hand, they did not want to provoke the pope into a damaging response over a single heretic. On the other, the council had to consider its image before the people of Venice; the important issue of national pride could not be ignored.
Eventually an answer was found, not by the council but by a lawyer, the most famous Venetian advocate of the time, Federigo Contarini, a man renowned for his creativity and subtlety. Devoid of ideas and desperate to find a way through the dangerous political confusion Bruno had created, the council had called upon Contarini in January 1593. It did not take him long to solve their problem.
Contarini sifted through the testimony, the witness statements, and the background to the Bruno trial, as well as the material in dispute, Bruno’s heretical writings. Before the Inquisition, Contarini reported that Bruno had “consorted with heretics, that he had escaped to England, where he lived after the fashion of that island, and afterward in Geneva, leading apparently a licentious and diabolical life. But Bruno had,” Contarini admitted, “a mind as excellent and rare as one could wish for, and is of exceptional learning and insight. Yet, his heretical offenses are very grave.”
Of course, there was nothing new in this statement. The officials in Venice already knew all they could hope to discover about Bruno’s “apparently…licentious and diabolical life,” and arguments over the man’s ideas would lead them nowhere in a clash with the Holy Office. But from the material available to him, Contarini had also quickly stumbled upon a possible loophole in the case, one that might disentangle the Venetian government from the mess and appease any public objections.
Blinded perhaps by religious zeal and bigotry, the Inquisition had, Contarini pointed out, overlooked two glaringly obvious facts. First, Bruno was not a Venetian citizen and therefore should not have expected the protection of Venice in the first place; second, and most important to the commercially obsessed Venetians, Bruno had been selling his books in Venice without paying taxes. In conclusion, Contarini made one further contribution. “The accused has continually asked to be accepted back into the bosom of the Church and has declared his intention to petition His Holiness directly. Why should this state prevent him in his avowed desire?”7
Contarini’s was a brilliant piece of legal scheming and came as something very sweet indeed to the doge and council, not to mention the frustrated Venetian Inquisition. Interestingly, Contarini concluded his delivery with a request that his part in the process remain secret from the public. The most likely reason for this is that the lawyer had useful contacts among the intelligentsia of Venice—men whom Bruno had befriended and who would not be so readily convinced of the solution Contarini had found for the problem of Giordano Bruno.
After conferring and discussing what Contarini had offered, the council recalled the nuncio, and through him a personal message was sent to Rome. “Due to the exceptional circumstances of the case,” it said, “…the heretic Bruno shall be delivered over to the nuncio.” The same day another letter was sent from the council to the Venetian ambassador in Rome, ordering him to make as much political capital from the arrangement as possible and declaring that the happy outcome of this dispute served only to strengthen the bond between Venice and His Beatitude.8
But for Giordano Bruno, Contarini’s cleverness served only to remove him from the one territory in Italy in which he might have had a chance of freedom and the opportunity to pursue his dreams unmolested. The following day, the prisoner was taken from his cell, clamped in irons, and transported under maximum security by sea to Ancona. From there, by horse, Bruno made his final journey along a fork of the Flaminian Way and on to Rome, where the Vatican prisons had been made ready for his arrival.