We shall prove that they are weak, that they are mere pitiable children, but that the happiness of a child is the sweetest of all. They will grow timid and begin looking up to us and cling to us in fear, as chicks to the hen. They will marvel at us and be terrified of us and be proud that we are so mighty and so wise as to be able to tame such a turbulent flock of thousands of millions. They will be helpless and in constant fear of our wrath, their minds will grow timid, their eyes will be always shedding tears like women and children, but at the slightest sign from us they will be just as ready to pass to mirth and laughter. Oh, we shall permit them to sin, too, for they are weak and helpless, and they will love us like children for allowing them to sin.
—Fyodor Dostoyevsky,
“The Grand Inquisitor,” The Brothers Karamazov
THE RECORDS TELL us that Bruno was “cast into the Prison of the Roman Inquisition, February 27, 1593.”1 But after that for almost six years, we know close to nothing about him. No official records of Bruno’s first six years in the Rome prison have survived. Our knowledge of this period comes only in fleeting glimpses, fragmented accounts, stray reports from visitors, and the paradigm provided by heretics past.
Various attempts have been made to explain this anomaly, but none is entirely satisfactory. It is possible Bruno was simply kept in solitary confinement for the duration and made no appearances before the Inquisition between 1593 and 1599. Another theory is that the time was spent by the Inquisition gathering information on Bruno. But even though the Church worked at exceptionally slow speed, six years is an inordinately long time for such a task; most of the man’s books were relatively easy to obtain, and the Papal Office had enormous resources to draw upon. Given these circumstances it seems likely that records were kept but have simply been lost.
Clement VIII, who had ascended to the papacy in 1592, was a relatively liberal pope, while his two primary advisers, Robert Bellarmine and Santoro di Santa Severina, held hard-line views concerning infringement of doctrine. Clement had shown himself to be an outstanding diplomat. In 1595 he had overseen the Europe-wide acceptance of Henry of Navarre as the legitimate king of France while successfully appeasing Philip of Spain, who had also been a legitimate claimant to the throne. It is possible that Clement may have quietly admired both Bruno’s courage and his intellect and genuinely wished to turn him back to orthodoxy.
Bellarmine, the pope’s personal theologian, was the most academically accomplished man in the Vatican, a Jesuit who by the time Bruno was imprisoned had been a professor of theology almost twenty years. On all matters of doctrine, Clement turned to Bellarmine, and for his trouble the pope was offered clear and conventional wisdom. Bellarmine rejected totally every aspect of Copernican heliocentric theory and did more than anyone of his time to hold back the flood of secular intellectual progress, earning him the epithet “Hammer of the Heretics.” He distrusted science and mathematics, and long after Bruno’s execution he did his utmost to undermine the ideas of Galileo. During his career he placed a long and varied list of books on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum.
Severina was no intellectual, but he burned with a fervent loathing of heresy in all its forms. At root an imperialist, he imagined the Vatican as a superstate, glorying in earthly power as it administered the link between God and humankind. When Clement had become the preferred choice for pope in 1592, Severina was deeply embittered, as he had hoped to wear the papal miter himself. His resentment fueled further his aggressive vision of the world and the role of the Church, causing his bloodlust to become still more exaggerated.
Because we know so little of the first six years Bruno spent in the Roman prison it is not possible to say who was responsible for his day-to-day treatment. Severina’s taste for pain and his desire to persecute might have meant Giordano Bruno received the cardinal’s special attention, in which case he would have suffered repeated bouts of the most severe torture and almost unimaginable privation. But it is equally possible that Clement had taken a personal interest in the Nolan and succeeded in tempering Severina’s ferocity.
Unfortunately, we have no eyewitness accounts of Bruno’s treatment, and if any records of his torture by the Inquisition were kept, they too have disappeared. All we have to go on is the way in which contemporaries and other heretics were treated by their jailers and persecutors. Most notable is the example of Tommaso Campanella, a man often compared with Bruno, a heretic both Bellarmine and Severina knew well, for they had imprisoned him and advised his torture.
In 1591, as Bruno was about to return to Italy, Campanella, a peripatetic magus, published a philosophical tract which outraged the Holy Office and led to his incarceration in Rome, where he spent much of the next quarter century suffering repeated torture and solitary confinement. A friend who had been allowed to visit Campanella described his condition. “His legs were all bruised and his buttocks almost without flesh, which had been torn off bit by bit in order to drag out of him a confession of the crimes of which he had been accused.”2 During a period of imprisonment by the Inquisition between 1594 and 1595, Campanella was tortured a total of twelve times, the last occasion lasting a staggering forty hours. Perhaps Bruno was treated just as cruelly.
For long stretches of time Bruno would have lain in a cell that was cast in almost total darkness, rank, tomblike, deathly still, freezing in winter, an airless oven in summer.
He had plenty of time in which to think, to remember, and for Bruno, a master of the art of memory, such reflections must have been clear but painful. On the one hand, he could recall the millions of images stored in his mind, summon up details of his past and with them alleviate the physical pain and the piercing loneliness. But on the other hand, this talent must have haunted him, as such a powerful memory undoubtedly distilled dreams of freedom, offered up recollections of fresh air and sunshine, making him yearn to escape.
Bruno was a man with a powerful ego, supremely confident and possessed of an almost indestructible sense of self-worth. Yet, the solitude, the surety that he would never experience freedom again, the knowledge that execution might not be far off, must have affected him deeply. There would almost certainly have been many times when he doubted himself, doubted the value of what he had done and what he was still doing. And beyond this, even if he never lost conviction, he could not have known the true power of his resistance to the Inquisition, leaving him uncertain what possible impact his actions would have.
And what would Bruno have contemplated during less agonizing periods? Surveying the arch of his life, would he have pondered his actions and questioned the decisions he had made? And if so, what would he have concluded?
One of the pivotal moments in his life had come with the decision to follow his master plan, the dream of using the influence of an internationally powerful figurehead to help produce a dynamic change in the attitudes of the orthodox Church toward his ideas. Henry III of France, the man Bruno called “this most Christian, holy, religious, and pure monarch,” had been his first target, but he was ill-suited to the task.3 He had then set his sights on Queen Elizabeth of England, but she too had been an inappropriate choice, for she had wanted only to play safe and to maintain the status quo; she had little appetite for further religious turmoil. To achieve her goals (aims that were altogether more orthodox than Bruno’s plans), Elizabeth would only contemplate the prosaic, the tried and tested.
Thus thwarted, Bruno lost hope in this project, at least until the political situation changed again, and he turned to a new scheme. Evidence suggests that between 1589 and 1591 (the final years before his return to Italy) Bruno had tried briefly to establish his own cult. According to an anonymous witness for the Inquisition in Rome, Bruno “said that formerly the works of Luther were much prized in Germany, but that after they tasted of his [Bruno’s] works they sought for no others, and that he had begun a new sect in Germany, and if he could get out of prison he would return there to organize it better and that he wished that they should call themselves Giordanisti….”4
It is possible that after coming to accept that no great political or religious figure would be in a position to project his socio-spiritual vision, and before placing his faith in converting the pope, Bruno may have briefly considered organizing a group or cult to act as a basis for a new religion. Perhaps for a while he saw this as the only way left to heal the rift in the religious and social fabric of Europe. Indeed, there is some evidence to support the theory that the mystical brotherhood known as the Rosicrucians (who published their manifesto the Fama in 1614) was initiated by Bruno himself.
It is certainly true that Bruno was associated with some of the most powerful and influential figures in the occult world of the 1580s, including John Dee, whom Bruno met during his stay in England. Dee and his associate Edward Kelly were known to have played a seminal role in establishing the doctrinal foundations of the Rosicrucians, and Bruno, who traveled from France to Germany in 1585, shared many of Dee’s convictions and Hermetic ideas. Twenty years after Bruno’s death a prominent French occultist and writer, Gabriel Naudé, wrote a widely circulated report in which he listed the names of eight philosophers whose ideas he believed lay behind the manifesto of the Rosicrucians. The list included John Dee, Raymond Lully, Paracelsus, and Giordano Bruno.5
The Rosicrucians were a secret society that taught an iconoclastic form of Christian Hermeticism. They were convinced of the psychologically empowering use of symbology and ritual. Many of their doctrines were retrogressive, placing as they did great emphasis upon the prisca sapientia. But like Bruno’s philosophy, the doctrine of the Rosicrucians also spoke of unification, of using the exciting vistas offered by the new natural philosophy. It is therefore no coincidence that many names usually identified with the founding of the Royal Society and the earliest gestation of the Enlightenment have also been linked with the Rosicrucians.6
At the time, Bruno certainly had no shortage of support from the rich and influential. There were many who would have given him the financing to start his own sect and to protect him in lands beyond the reach of the Inquisition. Most important of these was a highly respected intellectual and occultist named John Wechel, who arranged accommodation at a Carmelite monastery in Frankfurt for Bruno and provided him with a means of support.7 But even though Bruno had the opportunity to create and lead a potentially powerful sect, he turned away from this path and chose instead to concoct a new and altogether more radical and dangerous scheme. Little more than a year after arriving in Frankfurt, he was once more packing his few belongings and organizing plans for another journey, one that would lead to the court of the Venetian Inquisition.
When first considering what Bruno told the Venetian Inquisition, we are left confused. He contradicts himself, tells obvious lies (such as his declarations concerning his involvement with the occult tradition), and alternates between pious recanting and defiance. It is tempting to believe Bruno was insane, but this is difficult to justify when we consider the clarity with which he delivers his arguments and that only days before his arrest he was holding forth in philosophical discourse with Venetian intellectuals.
Instead, it would appear that from his arrival in Venice to his expulsion from the city some eighteen months later, Bruno had contrived every move and manipulated those around him with consummate skill. From Frankfurt, Bruno had kept Mocenigo waiting, played with him, pushed him to the edge. The months Bruno had spent in Padua had been another contrivance, a move to further frustrate his noble patron. Of course, Bruno knew well how the Inquisitors worked: they had been his lifelong enemies. He knew they wanted him placed before an official court and tried according to the rule book; and through his contacts in Venice (especially Ciotto, to whom Mocenigo had spoken candidly of his guest), Bruno must have known precisely what Mocenigo was planning and to whom he was answerable.
Rather than being the testimony of a madman, it is clear that Bruno’s performance before the court had been a flawless masterpiece of manipulation and deception. Bruno was obsessed with the occult world of pure spirit, but he had survived a peripatetic career filled with danger and had always stayed one step ahead of his enemies. To keep alive and to keep finding support, he had to be worldly-wise and politically astute. So, considering Bruno’s character and strength of conviction, his disappointment over his failure to use a statesman as a figurehead for his scheme, and the evidence of his performance in the Venetian court, it becomes clear that before his return to Italy Bruno had calculated carefully the moves he was to make if he was to fulfill his ultimate ambitions.
Bruno anticipated the political difficulties his case would cause the Venetians. He understood the delicate relationship between Venice and Rome, and he also knew that the Venetian Inquisition was far more liberal than its Roman counterpart. Nevertheless, he did not underestimate the danger and was extremely careful about what he said during the trial. Only in this way could he assure himself that in Venice there was only a very slim chance of facing execution as a heretic.
So Bruno calculated that this dangerous game had two possible outcomes. If he was extremely fortunate, the Venetians would free him and he might have a chance to remain unmolested in Venice and to teach there. If, however, the Venetians succumbed to pressure from Rome, he would be extradited and this would give him the chance to make direct contact with the pope. Once in the same room as Clement, Bruno believed he could fulfill his mission to convert the Holy Father himself and to lead the world to a new dawn.
To us, this may seem like a crazy notion, but Bruno was not only energized by his own determination, self-confidence, and sense of mission, he believed a confluence of factors would aid him significantly. In 1591, Henry of Navarre had overwhelmed the armies of the Catholic League (an extremist group financed by the Spanish monarchy) and had begun a campaign that would (by 1598) gain him the French crown. To Bruno and many other radicals throughout Europe, this grand success signaled the possibility that Rome would be forced toward a path of moderation, heralding a new age of religious tolerance and liberal Catholicism.
Bruno learned of this turn of events while in Frankfurt, at the very same time Mocenigo’s letters of invitation were growing more insistent, and it offered him valuable encouragement. But later, soon after Bruno’s arrival in Venice and as he proceeded with his design, he was given another boost when he heard stunning news from Rome concerning the occultist Francesco Patrizi.
In 1591, Patrizi published a work entitled Nova de universis philosophia, which detailed his own “new philosophy,” a liberal Catholicism which was certainly heterodox but admittedly less radical than Bruno’s own. In his treatise Patrizi called for the Church to seek better ways to treat heretics and proposed that instead of using “ecclesiastical censures or force of arms,” a blend of the Hermetic tradition and Christian theology would lead many more people to religious devotion and piety.8 He then took the bold step of dedicating his book to Pope Gregory XIV.
Within months of its publication, Pope Gregory died suddenly and Clement VIII took the throne in Rome. Learning of Nova de universis philosophia, the new pope immediately summoned Patrizi to the Vatican. Occultists across Europe were amazed when the philosopher set off obediently for Rome and quickly concluded that he would probably disappear into the dungeons of the Inquisition. But no harm came to Patrizi; instead of facing charges of heresy he was rewarded by Clement with a chair at the University of Rome.
So Bruno had some right to feel he too could influence the pope and change the structure of Catholicism. But in reaching this conclusion he had made three serious errors. First, the impact of Henry of Navarre’s conquest of France would only defuse religious tension in Europe after many more years of struggle, and this change would come far too late to influence Bruno’s plans. Second, Bruno had placed too much importance upon Patrizi’s reception in Rome. Patrizi was a philosopher whose theological arguments were altogether less radical than Bruno’s. But, crucially, unlike Bruno, Patrizi was flexible; he was a man who was able to compromise. Indeed, soon after starting his course at the university, Patrizi had inflamed the sensibilities of the Inquisition but kept his chair by obediently toning down the content of his lectures.
Bruno’s third error was to overestimate the power of the pope. Clement was an intellectual and a relatively liberal pontiff, but like most popes, he did not control the machinations of the Vatican alone. He had powerful enemies, and he relied upon his advisers, who were for the most part more hard-line than he, particularly in the matter of heresy and the treatment of radical thinkers.
Bruno’s scheme had taken him to the Inquisitors’ prisons, so close to the Holy Office, yet once there he was utterly powerless.
The earliest record of any form of trial of Bruno in Rome is dated January 14, 1599, a little less than five years and eleven months after Bruno’s imprisonment in the city. A congregation consisting of eight cardinals, seven coadjutors, and an official notary was present.
Two of the leading members of the congregation were Severina and Bellarmine (who would be made a cardinal later that year). The records report that Bruno’s books had been studied along with the records of his Venetian trial, from which a long list of pernicious heresies had been produced. These were read before the congregation, eight of the most heinous were selected, and a note was made that the papers and manuscripts would be subjected to further study in search of still deeper aberrations.
Sadly, the record does not itemize the eight chosen heresies, and these were not quoted in subsequent hearings. Bruno continued to deny that he had in any way acted as a heretic or written heretical material.
In most trials of heretics, this denial would offer clues about the nature of the charges, but not so with the Nolan. Many heretics accepted the label, but Bruno’s view of heresy was very different from that of his persecutors. He held core religious beliefs (the existence of God, the importance of Christ, the sanctity of communion); his support of these was unshakable, and we have to accept that he did not speak against them to others. But Bruno’s religious understanding was far broader than that of the cardinals devoted to orthodoxy. To Bellarmine, to Severina, and to the other judges arrayed against Bruno, the notion that life might exist beyond the earth, the idea that God could not have created merely a single home for life, that all things were interconnected on some nebulous spiritual plane, that the Holy Trinity was merely a confusion of words, all this would have resounded with the deepest tones of the heretic, outrages to be purged only by the cleansing power of the flame. Bruno saw none of this as heretical, and in his own inimitable style he could find ways to successfully coalesce his thoughts and views with the elements of orthodoxy he purported to honor.
At a second congregation three weeks later, six cardinals, seven coadjutors, and a notary gathered and Bruno was called upon to answer the charges of heresy. The report tells us that the accused argued against each of the eight points, but it does not tell us what he said. Indeed, aside from the description of the hearing made by the notary, the only other morsel to survive is a note in the archive written in a different hand from the notary’s that tells us: “His Holiness decrees and ordains that it be intimated to him by the Father in Theology, Bellarmine and the Commissary that all these propositions are heretical, and not now declared so for the first time, but by the most ancient Fathers of the Church and the Apostolic Chair. If we shall acknowledge this, good; if less, a term of forty days shall be allowed.”9
This statement is a clear indication of the conflict that had been playing out during the six years of Bruno’s imprisonment in Rome. It demonstrates both a severe tone, reiterating the charges of heresy, and a remarkable degree of tolerance in that Bruno is here offered another forty days in which to recant.
But forty days turned into nine months and more. What passed between the prisoner and the accusers is again unknown. It is most likely that Bruno argued his case with such skill that the learned judges were unsure how to deal with him within the limits of Church law. If nothing else, the extended period of grace Bruno was given demonstrates how his accusers were confused, lacking unity over the details of their claims and torn by conflicting emotions the man fostered in them. Based on what we know of Bellarmine, he would have argued that the heretic was entirely wrong, his statements worthless imaginings. But he needed Bruno to admit to this, to take back his claims and to confirm their falsity. Bellarmine could not yet face the prospect of simply having Bruno dragged to the stake without a recantation. Severina, a man from a very different mold, a man who cared nothing for intellectual games, would have tried his utmost to persuade the pope to burn Bruno as quickly as possible. In Severina’s eyes, this particularly repulsive little heretic was not merely a thorn in the side of the Holy See but a tangible threat to the stability of the Church. And yet, these men could not sign Bruno’s death warrant. As much as they could manipulate and coerce, they needed Clement’s support, and his remained the voice of tolerance. But there were limits even to his famed patience.
The Sacro Arsenale, the Inquisitors’ “handbook,” informs us: “If the culprit denies the indictments and these be not fully proved and he, during the term assigned to him to prepare his defense, have not cleared himself from the imputations which result from the process, it is necessary to have the truth out of him by a rigorous examination.” In other words, the heretic is given a period of time in which to recant, and if he does not confess then, he must be tortured until a statement is wrenched from him.
It is almost certain that Bruno faced torture during this period of his imprisonment, torture both officially sanctioned by Clement and conducted by stealth beyond the papal gaze. It was during the same stage of the process of persecution against Tommaso Campanella that he was so ruthlessly mutilated in an attempt to make him denounce his humanistic views, and there can be little doubt fire, water, steel, and rope were employed in an effort to make Bruno reposition the sun in orbit about the earth and to vanquish the specter of nonhuman beings breathing God’s alien air.
Again, there are no reports, no eyewitness accounts, to describe Bruno’s burns or torn ligaments, but the trace of the Inquisitor’s fingers and the wickedness that lit up the darkened cell with the torturer’s fire are there in the sense of irresistible stubbornness and resolve Bruno displayed during his final months. For torture merely hardened Bruno’s feelings. Rather than collapsing before the horrors inflicted upon him, Bruno struck back by utterly refusing to give way and by his growing commitment to martyrdom. As the days ebbed away, as he argued over every point of doctrine held against him, and as he saw his dream of direct personal contact with His Holiness dissolve to nothing, he knew the belief that had sustained him was untenable and a new role awaited him.
On December 21, 1599, Bruno was brought before the Inquisition again. This time, nine cardinals, including Bellarmine and Severina, faced him. Bruno again argued his case, addressing the eight points of heresy. “He was heard,” runs the report, “…concerning all his pretensions.” When asked if he would now recant, he said: “I will not do so. I have nothing to renounce, neither do I know what I should renounce.” Gone was Bruno the actor. Gone the Bruno who had orchestrated his own arrest and had played the Venetian Inquisition as a virtuoso bows Stradivarius strings. Here was a man calcified by pain, rigid with determination and self-absorption.
Yet, amazingly, the cardinals still held back; again, Clement tempered their rage. Bruno infuriated each of them, but equally they were all, in their own ways, determined to break him. He had shown himself to be unbending; physical agony merely strengthened his resolve. They would try another approach.
“It is thus decided,” a surviving fragment of a report informs us, “…his blind and false doctrine should be made manifest to him, and Hippolytus Maria and Paulus della Mirandola be appointed to deal with the said brother and point out to him the propositions to be abjured, so that he may recognize his errors and amend and recant; and show him all the good they can as soon as possible.”10
And so, over the festive season and into the new century, the two academics appointed by the court attended Bruno. They sat in his cell day after day and argued through the finer points of his ideas and his heretical doctrine as it had been laid out in his many books and lectures. The academics, the general of the Dominican Order, the Reverend Father Hippolytus Maria Beccaria, and the procurator of the order, Father Paulus della Mirandola, were Bellarmine’s acolytes. A figure so grand as the newly appointed cardinal would not stoop to visit Bruno in person, but his representatives served their master faithfully in the task of trying to turn Bruno from his own convictions, divert him from the path he had etched for himself.
Clement too needed to make some form of contact with this man whom none could break. He sent his personal confessor, Cardinal Cesare Baronius, to talk to the heretic. Baronius, an intellectual who was then midway through his twelve-volume masterpiece of Counter Reformation propaganda, Annales ecclestiastici, and who gave the pope daily absolution at confessional, reported to Clement on every detail of his conversations with Bruno.11 But clearly, Baronius never succeeded in gaining Bruno’s trust, because if he had, this would have provided the personal link with Clement that Bruno craved. The fact that nothing came of their conversations strongly suggests Bruno and Cardinal Baronius had not established any form of understanding. Furthermore, Baronius failed utterly to alter Bruno’s views. And Bellarmine’s stooges, Hippolytus Beccaria and Paulus della Mirandola, were equally unsuccessful in their quest.
On January 20, 1600, Bruno appeared before the congregation again. Once again, Severina, Bellarmine, and seven other cardinals were arrayed before the prisoner. Bruno was asked once more if he was willing to recant. He refused utterly, knowing that the time had long since passed when anything but death at the stake awaited him. If he recanted, he would be burned; if he did not, he would be burned. He was beyond all help.
Nineteen days later, he was brought before the cardinals once more and asked one final time if he was willing to recant. He was not. And so the long cruel indictment was read aloud: “On the 4th February 1599, a year ago, it was determined that the eight heretical propositions should once more be presented to thee, and this was done on the 15th, that shouldst thou recognize them as heretical and abjure them, then thou wouldst be received for penitence; but, if not, then shouldst thou be condemned on the fortieth day from then for repentance; and thou didst declare thyself ready to recognize these eight propositions as heretical and detest and abjure them in such place and time as might please the Holy Office, and not only these propositions, but thou didst declare thyself ready to make thine obedience concerning the others which were shown to thee. But then, since thou didst present further writings to the Holy Office addressed to His Holiness and to Us, whereby it was manifest that thou didst pertinaciously adhere to thine aforesaid errors; and information having been received that at the Holy Office of Vercelli thou hadst been denounced because in England thou wast esteemed an atheist and didst compose a work about a Triumphant Beast, therefore on the 10th September 1599, thou wast given forty days in which to repent, and it was determined that at the end of these days proceedings should be taken against thee as is ordained and commanded by the Holy Canon Law; and since thou didst nevertheless remain obstinate and impertinent in thine aforesaid errors and heresies, there were sent unto thee the Reverend Father Hippolytus Maria Beccaria and Father Paul Isario della Mirandola that they might admonish and persuade thee to recognize thy most grave errors and heresies. But thou has ever persisted with obstinate pertinacity in these thine erroneous and heretical opinions. Wherefore the accusation brought against thee has been examined and considered with the confession of thy pertinacious and obstinate errors and heresies, even while thy didst deny them to be such, and all else was observed and considered; thy case was brought before our general Congregation held in the presence of His Holiness on 20th January last and after voting and resolution we decided on the following sentence.
“Having invoked the name of Our Lord Jesus Christ and of his most Glorious Mother Mary ever Virgin in the cause and aforesaid causes brought before the Holy Office between on the one hand, the Reverend Giulio Monterenzi, Doctor of Laws, Procurator Fiscal of the said Holy Office, and on the other, thyself, the aforesaid, Giordano Bruno, the accused, examined, brought to trial and found guilty, impertinent, obstinate, and pertinacious; in this our final sentence determined by the counsel and opinion of our advisers the Reverend Fathers, Masters in Sacred Theology and Doctors in both Laws, our advisers: We hereby, in these documents, publish, announce, pronounce, sentence, and declare thee, the aforesaid Brother Giordano Bruno, to be an impenitent and pertinacious heretic, and therefore to have incurred all the ecclesiastical censures and pains of the Holy Canon, the Laws and the Constitutions, both general and particular, imposed on such confessed impenitent, pertinacious, and obstinate heretics. Wherefore as such we verbally degrade thee and declare thou must be degraded, and we hereby ordain and command that thou shalt be actually degraded for all thine ecclesiastical orders both major and minor in which thou has been ordained, according to the Sacred Canon Law: and that thou must be driven forth, and we do drive thee forth from our ecclesiastical forum and from our holy and immaculate Church of whose mercy thou art become unworthy. Furthermore, we condemn, we reprobate, and we prohibit all thine aforesaid and thy other books and writings as heretical and erroneous, containing many heresies and errors, and we ordain that all of them which have come or may in future come into the hands of the Holy Office shall be publicly destroyed and burned in the square of St. Peter before the steps and that they shall be placed upon the Index of Forbidden Books, and as we have commanded, so shall be done.”12
And this is where our story began, before this congregation of February 8. On that occasion, Bruno’s personal letter to the pope was opened but not shown to the pontiff. But of course, by now this hardly mattered anyway; the time had passed when anything could sway the thinking of Bruno’s judges. They could not now be swayed by anything. As the world had shuffled into a new century, nervous voices were raised in the Vatican. News of fanatical cults that believed in heralding an anti-Catholic age that could destabilize Europe put new fear into the minds of the cardinals. And because of this, Bruno’s execution had now become an imperative. And another factor in pushing the Inquisition to act came from the Spanish, close allies of the Vatican.
A few months before Bruno’s final hearing, the Spanish Inquisition, a body that acted quite independently of its Roman counterpart, had put down a religious uprising of discontented Dominicans led by the religious radical Tommaso Campanella. Campanella had inflamed a small band of heretical Dominicans to protest against their order and to proselytize the idea that the year 1600 would mark a global revolution in the Church and reshape Catholicism. This uprising was known as the Calabrian Revolt, because it had begun in Calabria (now part of southern Italy), an area then under Spanish control. The Spanish were therefore even more concerned over the arrival of the new century than was the Papal Office and considered Bruno a threat. When, early in 1600, an adulterous couple from the papal court had eloped to Spanish territory and were apprehended, an exchange of favors was quickly agreed. The couple would be extradited to Rome to face trial if Bruno was burned.
But the Holy Office had already decided Bruno’s fate; the only question was when the sentence should be carried out. To appease their Spanish neighbors, the Inquisitors may have brought the execution forward, but even that is uncertain. By this time, Clement had lost any remaining scrap of patience for the bedraggled little man before him and he would no longer stand in the way of his cardinals. Bellarmine had resigned himself to a Pyrrhic victory; he could not make Bruno recant. And so a final scene would be played out during which another dissenter would be sacrificed at the altar of dogma, another would join the hundreds of thousands slaughtered in the name of orthodoxy.
Led from the congregation and later that day handed over to the secular arm, Bruno was taken away to prepare himself for the waiting flames.