The constraints set upon emotions and behaviour were severe indeed.
By Dr. Peter Rietbergen
Emeritus Professor
Radboud Institute for Culture and History
University of Radboud
Introduction: Three Episodes
It is summer 1628. Somewhere in his private apartments in the Quirinal Palace on Monte Cavallo, where the air is less oppressive than in the Vatican, Pope Urban confers with a man recently released from the prison of the Congregation of the Holy Office in Naples, where he had spent many years on suspicion of heresy and witchcraft. Now, this man, the Calabrian friar-philosopher Tommaso Campanella (1568–1639) is casting the pope’s horoscope, having been asked to do so by the supreme pontiff himself. How had this strange situation arisen?
Urban is ill. He is afraid he will die. The heavenly signs are against him. Solar eclipses have occurred. Can he somehow alter his fate? His fear is aggravated because he knows people out there, in his town, are speculating on the possibility, laying wagers, as they so love to do. Many wish him dead. The poor, who always think that a new pope may, perhaps, be less exacting than his predecessors: for some decades, already, each succeeding pope has raised the taxes, while the Italian economy is in a bad shape and the common man has to tighten his belt. The city magistrates are waiting for him to die, too, hoping a “Sede vacante” will give them a chance to exercise some real power again.1 And some of the cardinals, of course, those whom Urban calls his ‘Brethren in Christ’: they may well be praying for his speedy demise as well, since at least one of them is certain to ascend the papal throne as his successor. Hence, rumour and expectations run high, both among the populace and the elite. Already, lists are being compiled of those who are considered “papabile”, because they can muster some support, either from one or more Christian princes, or from the various factions within the Curia itself.
Monday, April 13,1630. An anonymous reporter sits down to record his impressions of the past day. On Campo de’Fiori a priest, who had been solemnly defrocked the day before, has been hung and his books have been burned. The spectators waited till his neck broke. With him, six other men have been condemned, too; they, however, to long periods of service on the papal galleys—a less speedy but yet almost certain death. The Roman public had a heyday. A few hours later, a woman, dressed in something resembling a nun’s habit had been chased out of town, tied to an ass. When she had acted out this symbolic penance, her real punishment began: ten years in the prison of the Congregation of the Holy Office. Another observer, Giacinto Gigli, noted in his diary that she was immured after her ride, and died two days later.
Why were these people thus treated? The woman, not a nun proper but a lay-religious person, had been the priest’s accomplice in several unspeakable acts, involving obviously ‘black’ magic, unholy power exercised by him and by his accomplices.2
Saturday, April 22,1635. Count Giacinto Centini, incarcerated in the prisons of the Corte Savella, is writing to his wife along the following lines.3 Having shed the blood of innocent Christians, he accepts his proud head will have to fall. In his mind’s eye, he embraces his wife and their children. He trusts that his faithful consort, with her customary presence of mind, will take care of the family’s affairs and, with her sweet ways, will lighten the bitter misery of all concerned. She should write to his uncle, Cardinal Felice Centini, and ask for his support. He himself has forfeited any right to it. He hopes to yet receive God’s mercy. One more embrace.
Two days later, his head did indeed fall on Campo de’Fiori. Why did Centini have to die? He had been found guilty of the heaviest of crimes. With the help of six priests, he had tried to murder the Pope by magical means. Magic—white or black, ‘accepted’ by the Church or vehemently rejected by it—was an essential part of Roman Baroque culture.
Fear and Violence in Baroque Rome
Baroque Rome was a violent and a fearful city—as violent as any present-day metropolis, but maybe rather more fearful.
Though some people argue the opposite, I feel that violence is bred by constraint and fear.
The constraints set upon emotions and behaviour by the rules of Rome were severe indeed. Perhaps in consequence thereof, the sources that tell us about Roman life in the late 16th and early 17th century abound with fratricide, matricide and uxoricide, as well as with simple homicide. Indeed, veritable orgies of violence occurred.
In the1580s, Paolo Orsini, Duke of Bracciano, of an old Roman line, after having murdered his wife, took Vittoria Accoramboni to his bed and had her husband murdered with the help of her brother. While he himself died from the poison administered to him by his former wife’s brother, his paramour finally fell at the hands of his own brother, who had pledged to save the family’s honour.
At the end of the 1590s, in the sombre Cenci-palace in the centre of town, hatred had poisoned the relations in an aristocratic family of father, stepmother, daughter and brother, resulting in the daughter, Beatrice, and her stepmother murdering their father and husband. Both cases have excited painters, musicians and novelists through the ages—about Vittoria Accoramboni, John Webster wrote his play The White Devil in 1612, Stendhal his eponymous short story in 1837, and Ludwig Tieck his novel in 1840; while, in 1820, J.B. Shelley published his The Cenci, and Stendhal, who had a penchant for these gruesome tales, wrote Les Cenci in 1827.
In the 17th century, things continued,4 beginning with multiple murder in the proud Massimo-family and ending with Pompilia Comparini and her family dying at the hand of Guido Franceschini, the noble husband to whom she had been sold by her parents, a tragedy immortalised in Robert Browning’s poem The Ring and the Book. All this was aristocratic violence, sometimes explained as the emotional reaction of an elite who, as it felt power slipping from their hands because a centralizing government took control, felt challenged to find out how far they still could go with impunity. It also may be interpreted as the violence that resulted from a culture in which to preserve ‘face’, honour, was all-important, and where that face was the face of one’s family rather than of oneself and where, consequently, the fear of public shame stifled private emotional life.
But the diary of a simple Roman citizen like Giacinto Gigli is full of anonymous people involved in all kinds of violence as well. Moreover,reading the weekly avvisi, it is obvious the reporters were used to seeing people die in the streets, stabbed with a knife, killed by a sword; nor were they surprised to find that poison was used within households to get rid of those members of the family who stood in the way of fortune or happiness. Yet, of course people were afraid to face the consequences of their actions, for manslaughter was severely punished; if by invoking the cooperation of the forces of the nether world, they could somehow reach their goal undetected, or with impunity, they were quite willing to do so, even though this evidently ‘black’ magic, if detected, might incur the wrath of the Church.
The fears that beset the life of Romans as well as other Europeans of the time were manifold indeed. Life was harsh. Often, food would be in short supply, and people died from starvation or at least from the effects of malnourishment. Such a gruesome case as the one of the two Roman butchers who, in 1638, were beheaded and quartered because they had sold pork mixed with human flesh may have been connected with food shortage as well.5 Also, epidemics raged all over Europe with frightening regularity, and the Papal States, too, were ravaged several times during the early decades of the 17th century. Moreover, illnesses, if they occurred, often were incurable though doctors, relying on bleeding more than on any other treatment, pretended otherwise. In short, death was all too near. Painful death, or violent death, or a combination of the two. It was to escape from these fears, too, that people turned to magic, to forces unknown. For the universe was full of unexplainable things shown by signs in heaven and on earth.
In Rome, these forces perhaps were felt to be somehow more present and hence easier contacted than elsewhere. For this was a city of secrets, of wonders. In his diary, Gigli documented both the glorious and the gruesome ones, telling about the prodigies and monsters that appeared everywhere, even in one’s own neighbourhood: he writes about women giving birth to small abominations not even the parish priest wanted to baptize but also about the marvellous miracles, the ‘white’ magic, or holy power accompanying the discovery of the body of St. Francesca Romana in 1638.6
But the secrets, the wonders also ‘lived’ in the previous manifestations of this many-layered town. While each spade set in the ground to lay the foundations of a house, a palace, a church, might uncover the body of a saint, it almost certainly would also reveal a more pagan subterranean Rome, consisting of stratum upon stratum of strange buildings, decorated, sometimes, with frightening frescoes and wondrous statues. Also, once one set foot outside the small, essentially medieval centre in the bent of the Tiber—where most Romans lived and that was only slowly being enlarged in the course of the 16th and early 17th century—the built city petered out in the vast, still largely empty area surrounded by the huge Aurelian walls. The grand map of Rome published by the engraver Giovanni Maggi in 1625 as a conscious contribution to the self-glorification of ‘The Town’ during the Universal Jubilee Pope Urban had decreed for that year, cannot hide the fact.7 It was an area dotted with vegetable gardens, orchards and vineyards, but also with massive piles of old masonry, partially collapsed, covered with bushes run wild, ruins that were the lair of robbers and murderers, and, perhaps, worse. For while the ancient monuments were proudly viewed as the testimonies of a glorious past that had known great power and strength, at the same time they were conceived as places of magic. Especially the Colosseum was looked upon as an enclosure of demons and devils.8
In this context one should read one of the many fascinating pages written by Benvenuto Cellini, like Gigli an assiduous recorder of Roman life. Never one to let the occasion for telling a sensational story pass by, he recounts his nightly visit to the Colosseum, where, on his own request, a wayward priest involves him in an experience that yet proves rather unsettling: as the pentacle quivers above a youth lying naked in the theatre’s ruined precinct, demons appear that can hardly be constrained. Though, in his autobiography, Cellini tries hard to make light of the experiment, he does not care to repeat it.9
Devotion and Superstition in Baroque Rome
For centuries, Christian theologians had denounced all kinds of magic and, especially, the faith in the stars as grave sins, contravening the essential Christian doctrine of God’s omnipotence and his most precious gift to man, free will. But in the 16th and 17th century, that was learned theology. Even in its reinforced Tridentine version, it did not become the way most inhabitants of papal Rome thought. Nor did they act accordingly. Given the fact that official religion proposed life’s meaning as a mystery, it could easily walk side by side with the vision of the starry system proposed as a book to be read for the revelation of life’s secrets. For many, magic rites and devotional rites simply were one and the same repertoire of exorcising possibilities, proceeding from an equally simple, unconsciously syncretic state of mind.10
Arguably, devotion and superstition were expressions of the same culture, in which man tried to cope with the inconsistencies, the insecurities and, ultimately, the mysteries of life through various forms of religion. He would turn both to the one exercised by the official Church and to the others, traditions often of equally long standing. Emarginated, or, at times, condemned as heretical by the power of the ruling ecclesiastical elite, these religious manifestations yet held equal power over the minds of many.11 Official religion and its ideology—expressed in the difficult language that was theology—was barely understood by the masses, if at all. But priests there were, and things happened which one did not understand. If the official priests could or would not make sense of them, why not ask the unofficial ones, be they, sometimes, one and the same person.12 Magic, as much as theology, could serve as the most ‘rational’ explanation of the irrational that happened every day. Sorcerers could be sacerdotes, and vice versa.13
In need of comfort, people asked their priests for help. Using a variety of images, languages, the latter tried to formulate answers. A fusion of traditions, of means was inevitable. And confusion was inevitable. Sermons and devotional tracts certainly did not always speak a language of simple hope and of celestial joy. They voiced threats and alluded to fears that to the ear of the simple, the illiterate, though not only to theirs, could as easily belong to the world of God as to that of the Devil. The Devil was there, tempting man—in the Vita of Suor Francesca Farnese, the spiritual guide of Cardinal Francesco Barberini, he often turns up. But though she knew he represented fear, whereas a Christian should aspire to hope, many could not so easily avoid his power, for to many the very essence of their life was fear, and death, the Devil, was just around the corner, in a city of poverty, hunger and illness.
Indeed, confusion was inevitable. The magical world used the images of saints, the blessed water and the oil, to acquire power, just like the Church used them. In fact, the two liturgies, the official one and the clandestine one, were almost indistinguishable, if only because, so often, the men and women participating in unholy masses daily attended the holy ones as well. The same Fra Bartolomeo Cambida Saluthio (1557–1617) who was a fervent anti-magical sermonizer in Rome during the first decades of the 17th century, and whose Opere spirituali, posthumously published, were dedicated to Francesco Barberini,14 could advise a noble lady whose son was ill to take some oil from a lamp burning before the Sacrament or the image of the Virgin, express her belief, and apply it to those parts of her son’s body that hurt most. Faith would do the rest.15
Admittedly, if one takes stock of the amount of miracles recorded in Gigli’s Diario and attributed to the saints, one is struck by the fact that most occurred in the houses of the poor. So, perhaps, did the miracles worked by the spirits people did not dare mention for fear of the power of the Church and its inquisitors. And yet, in the palaces of the rich, too, miracles were prayed for and reported, as shows the case of Saint Philip Neri resurrecting one of the Massimo-siblings, born into one of Rome’s most ancient and influential noble families.
Also, the language of the Church as directed at the majority of its flock, was emotive rather than intellectual. At least partly, the devotion and piety fostered by so many treatises and images and practices was ultimately founded in theological and mystical traditions of great importance. Yet as presented on the popular level it was difficult to distinguish between these sanctioned images and the ones induced by man’s fantasy, which were less transcendental than the authorities thought acceptable. If God, the angels and the saints were presented almost as part of this world—the finer points of the discussions about the ‘literalness’ of the image, as exemplified, for example, in the case of the Bare Feet of St. Augustine surely must have escaped the larger part of the public16—one might as well ask them for a miracle, for an act of magic connected with the sorrows of this world, as for a rather abstract salvation in that unreal other one. Protection and help were offered, both in chapels and churches and in secret conventicles. Why should one not accept them both?
In a society where only a minority could read, and where images, illustrated stories abounded, especially the saints seemed to offer a many-layered response to the questions of the faithful. Indeed, they gave man a daily ration of identification and heroism that in later times was provided by other media, like 19th-century popular drama or the 20th-century soap-opera: identification with their suffering, and heroism in the way they overcame the limits of their existence. It was considered legitimate religiosity and, consequently, fed by their visual omnipresence in ‘The Town’. Fed, also, by their relics, that assured their actual, corporeal power. If one were powerful as the Barberini were, one amassed the manifestation of saints in one’s palace: indeed,I was quite surprised to find all Barberini dwellings were positively stacked with reliquaries holding bits and pieces of a great many martyrs and saints. But precisely these relics often came from the same ‘subterranean Rome’ that yielded other magical material as well. Though not added by the Church to the repertory of its official paraphernalia, might not that material be equally powerful?
Urban and His Stars
Even in his own days, the Dominican friar Tommaso Campanella had made quite a name for himself, already. A visionary with a decidedly remarkable ego, he had written a number of texts of a philosophical-speculative nature which, though some of them only were published in the later years of his life, circulated widely in either printed or manuscript form and ensured his fame in circles of scholars and scientists. At the same time, they brought him under the almost constant surveillance of the ecclesiastical authorities, who suspected him of heresy, if not worse. One of the reasons for their suspicion was the fact that he also dabbled in astrology, for example while trying to raise a revolution against the Spaniards in his native Calabria, in 1599.
Repeatedly resisting torture during his many trials, he finally feigned madness. Though escaping death at the stake, in 1602 he was incarcerated for life.17 Yet, while in the Spanish Inquisition’s prison in Naples, he completed the first six books of his Astrologia. ‘The whole world lives according to a common meaning’, he wrote, revealing his cosmic sensibility in which the stars gave the indications of that meaning.18
After a volte-face towards the Spaniards, he was released from prison in 1626, but immediately seized by the papal nuncio and transferred to the papal Inquisition’s cells in Rome. However, from 1627 onwards, he was given increased freedom by Urban who sought the cooperation of this undoubtedly learned monk who, also, proved a kindred spirit in astrological matters, in the preparation of a commentaried edition of his poems. In these commentaries, Campanella showed great insight in the papal self-image, cleverly playing on the Pope’s vanities and proclivities, both poetical and political. The first volume of the commentaries was ready by the end of 1628. Also, Campanella provided the ideological and actually astrological design for Sacchi’s great ceiling fresco in the main hall of the new Barberini-palace.19 Consequently, when, also in 1628, Urban began to feel ill and insecure, he consulted the Dominican friar on what he considered a matter of life and death, viz. the question whether the course of the stars could be so altered as to prevent his imminent demise.
Dressed in white robes, the two men retreated to a closed room in the Quirinal where the scene had been set to resemble Heaven. Seven torches had been lit and aromas and perfumes were burned.20 Music was played as well. Though we do not know by whom and to what tune, apparently it was done in such a way that the planets favourable to Urban’s longevity, Jupiter and Venus, would be attracted while Mars and Saturn, the adverse forces, would be repelled. One might even think it must have been vocal music, for the musicologists of the cultural circles frequented by Urban and Campanella, and, indeed, Campanella himself not only held that sung words communicated a moral message that aroused emotions in the audience but also that such song was part of the natural, celestial magic; it mirrored the order of the Heavens and could influence the influences of the planets and the stars.21
Campanella’s use of music was, in a way, rather more practical than theoretical, and did not resemble the ideas of his most important teacher, the neo-Platonist philosopher Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499), or such contemporary theories as Johannes Kepler’s (1571–1630). The latter two somehow stipulated a mathematical relationship between the system of music and the system of the cosmos, in Ficino’s case based largely upon the Asklepios-text of the Hermetic canon,22 while, in Kepler’s case, it referred to the causal connection between the two polyphonic systems through their geometrical archetypes.23 Campanella, however, did not see any identity of proportions between musical sounds and the heavens. Though the famous French musical theorist Father Marin Mersenne (1588–1648)—a mathematician specialising in primes who related his research to the ‘harmony of the universe’—reportedly remarked that Campanella would not recognise an octave when he heard it, the friar believed in the physical reactions produced by sounds: these put the listener in a suitable state to receive favourable planetary influences, in the same way as the significance of (sung) words, rather than their spoken sound or, for that matter, the metre of poetry, was supposed to have healing properties.24
Now, such musical ideas as Campanella’s were not new to Urban. Already in the booklet that accompanied the engravings depicting the ephemeral decorations installed for the procession of the Pope’s possesso in 1624, his ideologue Mascardi had written that the harmony of voices and instruments which had been heard on that occasion had represented the harmony of the virtues emanating from Urban’s well-disciplined soul.25 No wonder the Pope believed the negative influences that now threatened to destroy his harmony could be influenced wit hthe sound of specifically-composed music. Quite probably, Campanella devised the 1628-ritual especially to suit Urban’s case; indeed, his references to it do not occur in any of his pre-1628 astrological publications, but are included in the revised,1637-edition of the Città del Sole, his great utopian text, wherein they are presented as a major ceremony of the city’s inhabitants.26
But what was the result of the 1628-session? Let us only say that Urban continued to live for another fifteen years. And yet, his life continued to be in danger.
The Abbot of Santa Prassede and the Vicar of San Carlo
In the Roman monastery of Sta Prassede, the Florentine Orazio Morandi (ca.1570–1630) had risen to the position of abbot. Educated in the neo-Platonist, Hermetic culture of late 16th-century Florence, and, moreover, a friend of, among others, Galilei’s, Morandi was reputed to be a learned man, a philosopher and a theologian. His library showed his real interests within that wide and often ill-defined field, which definitely centred around astronomy and astrology.
With his background, Morandi easily attracted the friendship of many Roman intellectuals, among whom the Dominican Niccolò Riccardi, Master of the Sacred Palace, Rome’s chief censor, a man who could make or break an author by giving or withholding permission for the publication of a text.
At dinner, with such luminaries as Galilei sometimes present, people often discussed the works and ideas of Copernicus and Kepler, but conversation also would turn to Morandi’s own favourite topics. The abbot himself would oblige with prognostications about the death of various people based on the day and time of their birth in relation to the constellation of the stars. Though widespread, it was practising this pastime that, in the end, resulted in his imprisonment at the hands of the Inquisition and in the ensuing court case.
As the witnesses who appeared before the judges of the Inquisition declared, many Romans, both high-born and low, regularly visited Morandi to be counselled by him as to the appropriate course of action or non-action they should take, either in business or politics or in their emotional life.27 Though it might be frowned upon in certain circles, all this activity was not shrouded in great secrecy. Yet, Morandi must have known there were limits to what, with impunity, he might do or say in this field. Therefore, the question remains why, in 1628, he had chosen to convene a number of his high-born and high-placed friends to discuss the future of some members of the Barberini family and even of the Pope himself. Casting the Pope’s horoscope, he arrived at the conclusion Urban would die in February, 1630. Why he then decided to inform the Spanish government of his findings is even less clear. He may have reasoned that the powers in Madrid, who certainly were no friends of Urban’s, whom they considered dangerously pro-French, would be willing to reward him; perhaps, even, fearing that his occult activities, which were becoming all too widely-known, would soon incur the Pope’s wrath, he decided to strike pre-emptively. Nevertheless, he was mistaken, for precisely the political consequences of his predictions soon proved decidedly disadvantageous to his own fate.
First, diplomatic circles reacted to the news of Urban’s death, which caused a number of cardinals to hastily depart for Rome to be present when a conclave would be convened. However, other, more disturbing things happened as well. In these very months, the activities had been discovered of the rector of the church of San Carlo al Corso, a priest from Bologna who had a flourishing practice as a confessor and enjoyed the trust and esteem of many cardinals. But he had been known as a necromancer as well. One of his followers was a secular nun, whom he had convinced she was a saint. He also had made her see visions, wherein she visited Heaven and dined with St. Peter. At one time, he had celebrated the Eucharist on her naked belly, using incense and all other liturgical paraphernalia. During his process, it also became clear that he had allowed many people who had confessed to him, male and female, to indulge in sins of the flesh. Worse, however, was that he had declared he would be made a cardinal by the pope who was to succeed Urban. Worst, of course, was that he had even named the next pope, his fellow citizen from Bologna, Cardinal Domenico Ginnasi, thus denying the fundamental action of the Holy Spirit in the election of the Roman pontiff. When he was taken prisoner, many books of necromancy and a wax statuette of Pope Urban were found among his possessions.
During the hearings of the Inquisition, it also became evident that a whole group of priests and friars were involved, who celebrated black masses both in Town and in the surrounding villages. Employing allsorts of magic, they also slept with various women at the same time. When the inquisitors had reached their decision, this group was led into St. Peter’s to publicly abjure their crimes. The main culprit was hung on Campo de’ Fiori.28
With such a variety of scandals seemingly springing from the Morandi prognostications, Urban obviously could not tolerate the Abbot himself to go unpunished. In July 1630, he ordered Morandi’s imprisonment. When Morandi’s papers were searched, evidence was found of a network of contacts in which astrological advice was being distributed all over Italy. Soon, the actual extent of Morandi’s circle of friends became clear as well, and the judges could not but note that many involved belonged to the Curia, and to famous monasteries; among them, there were medical doctors and theologians, friars and lawyers. Meanwhile, Morandi, on being interrogated, admitted he had found that many accidents could not be divined, as he had told his clients, ‘but only studied after they had actually happened’.29 Apparently, the new critical, empirical spirit was there, at the same time as the old belief in a possibility to foresee—and alter?—the future.
This partial retraction, whether faked or not, did not help Morandi. Urban wanted to have the whole episode dealt with and forgotten as soon as possible. Fate helped. In October 1630, the Abbot of Santa Prassede died in prison. Gigli wrote that poisoning was suspected, but a doctor declared that no traces were found; however, the story was likely enough, according to Gigli, because Morandi’s religious brethren of the Vallombrosa Order would rather have him die this way than face their community’s public disgrace when he, too, would be executed on Campo de’Fiori.30
How to Murder a Pope?
The death of Giacinto Centini in consequence of a verdict established by the six cardinals who made up the Congregation of the Holy Office was determined in their last meeting in the convent of Sta Maria sopra Minerva, on the morning of Saturday, April 21,1635. It concluded a case that had been dragging on for three or perhaps even four years. The meeting lasted for five hours.
It is difficult to reconstruct what actually happened. The court records of the Inquisition, to give the Congregation its more popular name, are only now being opened to researchers; however, a lot of material is lost, if only because, especially in cases concerning black magic, the papers were burned immediately after the verdict had been reached.31 Moreover, the verdicts themselves were not supposed to contain too detailed a description of the nefarious practices used, for fear of instilling the wrong ideas in those who were present at their public reading. But if, on Sunday, April 22, we would have joined the some 20,000 Romans who gathered in St. Peter’s as well as in the open space that was not then a paved piazza, yet, we would have been told what the cardinals did want us to know.
In the huge church, which only recently had been completed after more than a century of building activities, a stage had been built against one of the dome’s massive pillars. To that stage, the eight prisoners tried and convicted for their involvement in the plot to murder Pope Urban now were brought, Centini first, each a foot, each chained, each accompanied by two sbirri, the policemen of the governor of Rome. The first three entered without a lighted candle. Thus ,the public knew they had been given the death penalty.
When they, eight criminals, had been ranged in full view of the crowd, a monk, clad in black, ascended the pulpit. Singing—which, perhaps, should be interpreted as reciting in a ringing bass voice,32 obviously because the Church wanted to ensure that this was not a spectacle, only, but that people would know why this ceremony was staged—he first addressed the main culprit with a summary of the accusation and the verdict, beginning: ‘You, Count Giovanni Centini…’
During the following three hours, as the verdicts were read, a complicated and dramatic story unfolded that has been preserved in a number of manuscript texts. There are two, only, that seem eyewitness accounts, or at least are written to give that impression. One of them isa lively tale of the abjuration-ceremony in St. Peter’s, but very short on background information;33 most texts follow this one’s main argument, though differing from it and from each other in small but revealing details.34 The other has considerable more particularities concerning the process itself, almost as if the author had been given access to the court records.35 Despite what has been said above, this is not entirely improbable. First of all, it was always difficult to keep a secret in Rome. Secondly, one might suspect that the Pope, being closely involved in the case, did not want to be accused of partiality, especially as the verdict was definitely harsh. Maybe he had intimated that details about the Congregation’s sessions might be leaked, so as to make clear that the evidence was absolutely damning and, hence, the punishment, though strict, entirely just. On the basis of all these texts, it is possible to reconstruct and interpret the case.
Sometime in the 1620’s, one Diego Gucciolone, born around 1585, an Augustinian friar hailing from Palermo, had to flee Sicily because of his criminal practices, apparently including witchcraft. He went to Spain but there, too, soon engaged in necromancy, and consequently was prosecuted by the Inquisition. Seeking refuge in Portugal, he offered his services as chaplain to the fleet that sailed to the Indies. Returning after six years, he came back to Italy and, under false pretences, began a new life, now as a travelling Augustinian friar, giving his name as Fra Bernardo di Montalto. In 1628, he finally settled in a hermitage near Monte Cassano, close to Recanate. There, too, he soon became known as a ‘very experienced necromancer’. In that capacity he was approached by the prior of an Augustinian convent in the region, one Domenico Zancone, a believer in witchcraft as well.
Zancone, then probably 32 years old, asked his help because he wanted to seduce a woman who was unwilling to give in to him. According to Zancone’s testimony before the Inquisition’s judges, Bernardo suggested he make a wax statuette of the woman and hang it by a thread in his window. As the wind moved the statuette, the woman would be aroused. Another witness, however, told that the statuette had hung above a fire, the idea being that the heat would influence the woman. In any case, the statuette fell and disappeared, and the plan misfired.
Enters a young nobleman, by name of Giacinto Centini, some 27 years of age, living in his villa of Spinetoli, near Ascoli.36 He knows the monk Domenico, and approaches him. As to his motives, some additional sources give interesting evidence. Since the Centini-case attracted huge public attention, the chroniclers of the day were not the only ones to comment upon it. Obviously, the Pope’s biographer could not avoid mentioning it, either. According to Nicoletti,37 Giacinto Centini had been a young farmer when his uncle Felice, a Franciscan monk, was raised to the cardinalate because of his exemplary ways. Incidentally, Felice got his red hat in 1611, at the same time Maffeo Barberini did.38
Felice’s cardinalate had immediately conferred noble status on his nephews. Hence, Giacinto became a count and was married off to a daughter of the wealthy Malaspina family, while his brother Maurizio entered the priesthood and soon was known as a competent philosopher and theologian; eventually, he was made bishop of Milete.39
The combination of Giacinto’s vanity and the public recognition of his cardinal-uncle’s merits soon led the young man to believe that even the papacy might be in the family’s reach. When Felice would be elected pope, assuming, of course, that Urban conveniently died, he himself might become the all-powerful cardinal-padrone. Up to this moment, there is nothing in contemporary Roman society that does not make this an altogether plausible story, fitting most of the known facts. Indeed, one wonders in how many a cardinal’s nephew’s heart such hopes were not secretly cherished.
As his uncle grew older, Centini, becoming impatient, started brooding. Sometime in 1629, he asked Domenico for a manuscript on necromancy and was given the Clavicula di Salomone, provided by another friend of Domenico’s, the Augustinian friar Giorgio Vannarelli, who also dabbled in ‘black’ magic and, not insignificantly in view of the circulation of such texts, later told his judges he had stolen it from one of his ecclesiastical superiors.40 What with one thing and another, Domenico introduced Bernardo to Giacinto, and soon the first meeting between the three was arranged.
Giacinto wanted Bernardo to tell him who would be pope if Urban came to die. Obligingly, the hermit consulted the book of prognostications of one ‘Gioacchino’. This, I think, must have been Joachim of Fiore’s ‘Prophecies’41 of which, besides the early printed versions, manuscripts probably circulated as well. Such texts that, after their first appearance in print, were deemed dangerous or subversive, often were put on the Index by the Inquisition. However, precisely because they were forbidden, they continued to enjoy a widespread reading in manuscript form, as apographs; this not only ensured their survival but also, in a way, enhanced their authenticity and, hence, their authority—for a printed text always retains something of the copy.42
And lo, in the magic wheel Bernardo discovered that a Franciscan, obviously Giacinto’s uncle, Felice Centini, would succeed the reigning pope. However, there was one devastating detail: before that would happen, Urban would continue upon the throne for a discouragingly long period.
Then either Centini or, as Centini himself testified, Domenico suggested this situation could be remedied, hinting that Bernardo knew how. Whether the hermit took fright at the idea of conspiring to murder the Pope is not clear, but he refused to cooperate. Yet, after some months, wherein Centini bombarded him with beseeching letters and, finally, threatened to kill him, he agreed, telling the young count there were seven secret ways of getting rid of someone. The method of the wax statuette was the most efficacious. And as he was Master of Hell, knowing how to call all devils to his aid, there would be no problem in fulfilling Centini’s dearest wish.
In 1630, therefore, another meeting was called. Bernardo would be the chief magus with Domenico acting as his oracle, while Centini would assist them. Bernardo now used the Clavicola as well as a manuscript on necromancy by one Abbano, which he had procured from yet another friar, the Franciscan Ambrogio Vartasconi; this must have been one of the astrological-magical texts written by the medical doctor and philosopher Pietro d’Abano (1250–1315), famous for his commentaries on Aristotle and Dioskurides, as well as for his translations, from the Arabic, of Galen’s medical work.43 Thus prepared, Bernardo set the scene.
First, fresh ashes of cypress wood were spread on the floor of a room in Centini’s villa. Then, three circles were laid, with a thread spun by a virgin. The first one was dedicated to Jupiter, the second and third ones to two spirits. Apertures had been left in the circles, above which arches had been raised with the names of angels and devils scripted on them, to allow the demons to enter. This, as we know, was the sacred space44 leading up to the triangle that had been drawn within the inner circle. There, a Mass to the Holy Spirit was celebrated. Sheets of paper with pens made of the feathers taken from live geese lay at hand alongside the altar. However, when Bernardo started calling the lower spirits who had to write down the names of the higher, none appeared. After several hours, he gave up, telling Centini that a new appointment would have to be made, in another place, as this location was evidently unsuitable—perhaps a murder had been committed, there.
By now, Domenico took fright, wanting to back out. Bernardo, taking Centini aside, told him that for the next meeting to be more profitable other priests had to be brought in as well; moreover, one of them would have to be sacrificed. Domenico, catching some of their conversation, rightly concluded they meant him to be the victim.
Though Centini tried to ply them with a grand meal, and even with the promise of a cardinal’s hat, he evidently felt he could not trust his fellow conspirators. Domenico he followed to Fermo, intercepting him along the road and saying he would kill him if he gave the plot away—even if Domenico invoked the sanctuary of the tabernacle. He threatened Bernardo as well.
Still, in the same year 1630, a new meeting was indeed arranged,with a new installation made of new, unused materials. Moreover, three other priests had joined the group, all three, as came out during the process, practised necromancers who were experts in helping people retrieve lost treasures, et cetera.
For this occasion, a statuette of the pope had been made, fully clad in his pontifical robes and wearing the tiara. Bernardo baptised it with Holy Oil and said a Mass of the Holy Cross. One Fra Cherubino Serafini, some 36 years old and reputedly ‘a devil from Hell itself’, entered the circles as well, to say a Mass of the Holy Spirit, consecrating a newly-made knife covered with secret signs according to the prescription of the Clavicula. A third one, Fra Pietro Zancone, Domenico’s brother, and a Franciscan, too, stepped in to hold Urban’s likeness above the fire that had been lit in a brand-new brazier. After a few minutes, however, the knife on which the statuette had been fixed became too hot, and the wax figure fell into the fire. Nevertheless, Bernardino continued to imprecate the spirits to appear, and tell him if the Pope was dying as his image was, too. Many hours went by, with no result. At last, Bernardo proclaimed this, too, to be an unfit location.
In the subsequent weeks, Centini and his accomplices scoured the region to find a suitable spot, travelling far into the dark Abbruzzi mountains. According to the summary read to Centini in one of the manuscript records of the case, they did find one, and practised the ceremony on the statue of an innocent woman; a spirit did appear, and proclaimed the woman’s death.45
For the next, decisive meeting, Bernardo demanded the attendanceof no less than seven priests.46 But by then, it was 1631. By then, also, Domenico, still afraid that when a new meeting would be convened,he would be the first victim, had fled to Rome. So had Cherubino Serafini, apparently wary of Centini’s constant presence in his home region. However, Centini did not give up easily. Staying well out of the capital, he confided in his uncle’s Roman agent, Flaminio Conforti, and asked him to shadow his accomplices. An exchange of some 150 letters resulted—needless to say they have not been preserved. Soon, Conforti could tell Giacinto that Domenico frequented the whores; he succeeded in catching him “in flagrante”, and blackmailed him with his knowledge. This stratagem, however, backfired. Probably both afraid and angry, Zancone now went to the judges of the Inquisition in Rome, to confess of his own will in return for a reduced punishment. By then, it must have been 1632 or, perhaps, 1633.47
During these months, the other conspirators were caught and imprisoned as well. In May, 1634, Cherubino succeeded in escaping from the Inquisition’s prison: after having made a hole in the wall of his cell, he hid under the laundry to get outside the gates. Immediately, safety procedures were revised and the guardian responsible for giving the laundryman his exit permit was given a heavy fine. However, as the public knew this was a prison destined for necromancers, and as in this period it had started to heavily rain each day exactly at six p.m., supernatural forces were believed to have been at work.
Cherubino, having left town after a few days in hiding, travelled all the way to Rieti, rather foolishly proclaiming his escape to whomever would listen. In the end, he decided to take refuge in a nunnery at Foligno, where he had used to preach, asking the nuns to take care of him. They, of course, were highly intrigued by his story, but, more surprisingly, did not give him away. Meanwhile, however, the sheriff of Foligno had been given notice of Cherubino’s escape and, rumour having reached him of the friar’s return to the monastery, he went to visit the nuns. He told them that not even the monastery’s confessor could absolve Cherubino and that they had better deliver him to the authorities. Thus, the Franciscan was brought back to Rome, to the Inquisition’s prison where, one must assume, the other suspects had been jailed as well.48
Crime and Punishment: The Trial of Giacinto Centini
The papal Inquisition, from the late 1580’s onwards, had become quite used to dealing with cases of magic and witchcraft. Indeed, while during the greater part of the 16th century the Inquisitors had spent most of their energy combating the monster of heresy, especially in its Protestant, or ‘Lutheran’ form, till the end of the 17th century they would concentrate on this far more surreptitious enemy from within.49
It is not easy to reconstruct what may have happened to Centini and his accomplices once interrogations began. The papal Inquisition,as an instrument of power, not only operated between leniency and rigour, it also was extremely prudent in its dealings, especially in cases of witchcraft. Yet, details about its procedure were not printed, if only for fear of revealing to the public the kind of practices it wanted to eradicate. Still, for the early 17th century two manuscript instructions survive, one of them dedicated to Francesco Barberini as Cardinal-president of the Congregation of the Inquisition;50 they were written by two episcopal members of the Scaglia-family, one of whom sat on the Inquisition’s bench for many years.
It is important to know that a simple confession by itself was not deemed enough evidence to warrant conviction. Yet, a confession there had to be. If necessary, torture was used to obtain it, though it was known that suspects of necromancy and witchcraft often were able to withstand even the severest forms of torture precisely through the use of black magic, applying all kind of ointments and hiding spells in the secret places of their body.51 Whether through these means or from rather more psychologically explainable reasons, many people were indeed able to stand the pain. Recent research in the criminal records of Paris has shown that only in one per cent of its application torture was able to effectuate a confession.52
However, the papal Inquisition insisted upon additional evidence. Nor was it sloppy in obtaining it. Thus, people named by the suspects as their accomplices were not acceptable as witnesses, which, effectively, precluded the occurrence of the epidemical witch-hunts that characterised Northern Europe till well in the 17th century. Therefore, the Inquisition’s officers first of all searched for material proof; this might consist of papers with magical signs or incantations or the more popular treatises on magic, such as the Clavicola and the texts of D’Abano.53 Also, witnesses were called, who might testify to knowledge of or even participation in rituals of magic. If these included the sacrilegious use of the sacraments, such as Mass, or the invocation of the Devil the suspect would be in grave danger indeed, for these acts were considered heretical and, hence, punishable by death.
The interrogation of the suspects themselves always included questions about their state of mind. Did they feel they had been duped by the Devil, or had they asked for his help of their own, free will? If the latter were the case, and the suspect were an educated person, matters looked bad for him, or her, too, for punishment then would be rather more severe than for some uneducated clot who had succumbed to the temptation of posing as a magical healer—there were many of them, operating openly alongside the trained physicians—or as a helpmate in the discovery of hidden or lost treasure.
The Inquisition’s circumspection certainly showed in its dealings with Centini. According to Nicoletti, he was brought before his judges no less than 56 times. First, he maintained he had only asked the hermit for help because he wanted to discover some hidden antiquities in his villa’s garden. Then he revoked his testimony, and said the friars had come of their own account, yet to search for hidden treasure. Apparently, in the end Centini was allowed to confess not under torture but by “giuramento”, on oath. The others probably were beaten, with only Conforti refusing to confess despite being given the whip for an hour. Most stories emphatically state that Bernardo was not beaten but convicted on the overwhelming force of the witnesses’ evidence.54
Though Giacinto threw himself at the Pope’s mercy, yet, when Urban’s verdict came, it was harsh indeed. Found guilty of “lesa maestàdivina e humana”, he was to be burnt alive. All his possessions were confiscated by the Holy Office.
Bernardo would be hung. So would be Cherubino. Bernardo hadranted all through his hearing. He screamed when the verdict was pronounced and was given an iron lockjaw. Perhaps the Inquisitors were unpleasantly reminded of the even in its pictorial form rather fearful image of the open mouth, of the screaming face that in contemporary iconography always denoted devils, gorgons, evil spirits.
Domenico Zancone narrowly escaped death, in view of his voluntary confession. Still, because he was guilty of the death of the woman he wanted to possess, he was sent to the galleys for life. Conforti was given a mere ten years. However, as he had not denounced Centini and, even more, had advised him to flee to Germany, he was found guilty of heresy, but was given the chance to publicly renounce this crime, and the obligation to say an Our Father, a Hail Mary and the Credo each day of his life.
The three friars, accomplices in various degrees, were punished accordingly. Vannarelli, as having known the purpose of the conspiracy, was condemned to seven years in the galleys; Pietro Zancone and Ambrogio Vartasconi got off with five.
When all this had been proclaimed in a tumultuous St. Peter’s—one of the eyewitnesses reports how the public screamed, and another tells that one of the policemen was killed by the mob, which necessitated the re-consecration of the basilica55—the prisoners were led away.
Meanwhile, the two priests had been defrocked, first, and then returned to prison, as was, in the end, Centini himself, who was put in a blinded carriage and driven to the Corte Savella, there to await his last day. During the night, he wrote, or finished his two last letters, the one to his wife, the other to his uncle.56 In the latter he expressed his guilt, admitting his crime deserved to be punished by death and thanking God for being allowed to die as a “cavaliere”. He hoped his uncle would pray for his soul’s salvation, ending the letter once more asking the forgiveness, both of his uncle and of his wife and children. It is a significant sequence, showing the hierarchical importance of parentage and relatives even over one’s nearest family. Another source maintains Centini wrote yet a third letter, viz. to his episcopal brother, which, however, has not been preserved.
Monday morning, Campo de’ Fiori soon filled with spectators, thousands of them—the roofs threatened to collapse under their weight.57 Despite the use of their sticks, the police had great problems in keeping the public away from touching and, one might conclude from the wording of some texts, even kissing the gallows and the executioner’s axe.58 Apparently, people wanted to participate in the sacred, healing power of these instruments of death and, eventually, redemption.
The presence of the axe showed that, somehow, sometime, the original verdict had been changed. Instead of being burned alive, Centini would be beheaded—the privilege of a nobleman. According to the Pope’s biographer, Urban had wanted to show clemency because he wished to express his esteem for the criminal’s uncle. Other sources maintain Centini could not be burned because of his noble status. Anyhow, he would have the rank of his uncle to thank for this privilege, which, within the value system of Rome, meant the Centini-family would not be as disgraced as otherwise would have been the case. Still, the indefatigable diarist Giacinto Gigli reports that a few days after young Centini’s execution, his brother, Bishop Maurizio, was called to Rome and put in the Inquisition’s prison.59
At six p.m., the procession arrived. Almost all tales concur in telling how admirably Centini behaved during his last moments: another paper fabrication for propagandistic purposes? Well, perhaps, but the variety of the texts does not really bear this out. However, all texts do tell he refused to let the executioner touch him to remove his cloak and shirt, to lay bare his neck, doing it himself, with great “leggiadria”—refined elegance.60 Once more expressing his guilt, and his remorse,he died with “grandissima rassegnazione”.61 His head was shown to the public—another instance of actions in real life mirroring the message proposed by, especially, religious art. Did not the paintings adorning the walls of chapels and churches all over Rome depict biblical heroes like David and Judith holding up the head of enemies rightly slain, of criminals justly punished, in sign of the power God had given them?
For the next days, Centini’s corpse was exposed to the public outside the church of St. John Beheaded, between two burning torches.
During their last moment, the other two main culprits showed remorse as well. They were first hung till their neck broke. Then, their bodies were thrown in the fire. Their ashes were spread on the waters of the Tiber.
All this had left the Romans aghast. For days, the talk in the shops and in the streets returned to this terrible moment, but the general feeling was that justice had been done. People did commiserate with Centini’s lot, asking why he had not been satisfied while Fortune laughed on him, a simple farmer turned nobleman, the sole heir of a cardinal who, himself of poor parents, yet had amassed a fortune; it is a remark which shows that even a Franciscan friar, despite his vows of poverty, did not try to withstand temptations, or, more likely, was not allowed to do so, because society with its stress on the virtue of piety demanded he let his family share in his new situation.
Surely, people concluded, Centini had been possessed by the Devil. Moreover, had he been patient, who knew if he would not have reached his desired goal, after all?62
We do not know whether Centini was widely mourned. The chronicler Teodoro Ameyden suggested Cardinal Centini was enraged at the Pope’s harshness.63 According to Nicoletti, however, Felice Centini, after having ascertained he was in no way implicated or held accountable for in his nephew’s crimes, showed no sadness whatsoever about Giacinto’s fate.
Urban and Campanella
Whereas most people involved in the three cases of 1628–1630 that somehow threatened to affect Urban’s life died a horrible death, Campanella was spared. Indeed, but for his many enemies—who deplored his hold over the Pope, that, also, came with his work on the papal poems64—his session with Urban probably would not have become public knowledge at all and the situation would not have been perceived by the Pope himself as being harmful to his own position. To succeed in arranging his fall from papal grace, Campanella’s detractors cleverly used that instrument of power par excellence, the printing press.
From 1629 onwards, the publishing house of Prost-frères, at Lyons,was engaged in printing Campanella’s Astrologia. After the publication of the first six volumes, in 1629, they received an addition to the text, titled De fato siderali vitando, with the request to attach it to the book as its seventh volume; it was duly published—whether in Lyons or, as has been suggested, surreptitiously in Rome itself and, moreover, by the Vatican Press.65
Soon, Campanella realised he had been framed: the text contained, if not a verbatim, yet an all too literal account of his secret sessions with Urban, which openly showed the Pope’s astrological inclinations, and his participation in ritual that according to the Inquisition’s standards could easily be termed black magic. This sealed the friar’s fate.
He was not nominated adviser to the Holy Office, the Inquisition, as had been envisaged both by him and, perhaps, by the Pope. On the contrary, he was imprisoned again, though then liberated anew. For though Urban was greatly displeased with the publication of the Defato, he did allow Campanella to submit it to the Inquisition. Remarkably, they did not consider it heretical, which effectively exonerated Campanella.66 This, it seems, was the effect of a tract in which Campanella tried to extricate himself from this predicament. In the Apologeticus ad libellum “De siderali fato vitando”, he argued that everything that had happened between him and the Pope could and should be innocently explained.
The white robes were to protect them against the influence of eclipses; the seven torches represented the seven planets; the perfumes had been used to clear the air of evil smells. Moreover, there was no superstition, no black magic, no pact with the Devil. Although Campanella does not explicitly say so, one might even assume that the sealed room represented an undisturbed, as it were normal celestial world, wherein the candles and the torches acted as the lights of a substitute firmament, ordered as it should be, to counteract the unfavourable dislocated conjunction of the actual planets in Heaven outside; indeed, the entire ritual was intended as a prophylactic against the disastrous effects of eclipses and bad planetary influences.
In arguing like this, Campanella not only tried to make clear these lights did not symbolise the planets, which, as he knew, would have reeked too much of demoniac magic; he also hoped to demonstrate the essentially physical nature of his kind of magic.67 For his power,according to him, was the power of science.
Indeed, he went on to explain he advocated a form of astrological physics, a science that did not contravene the Church’s teachings. Either by demonstration from empirical data or by probability, inferred, also, from empirical data, the course of the stars could be known. It did not influence Man’s free will, as the Arabs argued. It did, however, influence both Man’s physical body and his animal passions; these, in their turn, influenced Man’s God-given, immaterial spirit that had to decide whether or not to give in to these passions. Obviously, Campanella was trying to enlist the support of the great Saint Thomas. In a way, his reliance on the authority of Aquinas was not a simple expedient, only. For admittedly, the great saint had been rather contradictory in his statements about astrology, and some texts, probably not of his hand, but favouring certain types of astrology, had been uncritically included in the official, 1570-edition of his works, published in Rome. Hence, Campanella freely used him to substantiate and authorize his own idea that,per accidens, the stars, steered by God’s servants, the angels, influenced both the body, its animal spirit and, consequently,its immortal soul. In the long-winded title of his Astrologia, he therefore claimed that his physical-physiological astrology was in complete accordance with God’s creation and the Church’s interpretation of it. Obviously, all these ingenious, indeed sophistic arguments cannot have satisfied the more orthodox theologians, but they did procure him his freedom.
Moreover, it seems Urban still was fascinated by the ideas of the Calabrian monk. After Campanella had been set free, the Pope allowed him to try and realize his great project of a Collegio Barberiniano; there, missionaries would be trained who, eventually, were to spread the new, reformed Catholicism all over the world—a Catholicism, however, very much in Campanella’s emphatically unorthodox vein. No wonder nothing came of it. Indeed, Campanella’s position became increasingly untenable. Finally, in October 1634, Urban allowed or even urged him to leave Italy for France, so as to escape the risks of further prosecution. One must assume he wanted to prevent Campanella from becoming a continuous embarrassment. Also, the French ambassador in Rome, knowing Campanella’s anti-Spanish feelings, was quite willing to help him get to Paris. Probably while there, in view of a new edition of his work, Campanella removed from the proofs the allusions to his conferences with the Pope.68 Yet, he continued to dabble in astrology, in 1635 casting the horoscope of the newly-born Dauphin: the young Louis who later became the Sun King, the embodiment of the image so dear to Campanella’s astrological and prophetical visions,69 the man who not only symbolically positioned himself in Urban’s footsteps but very much wanted to be the successor of papal and indeed Roman supremacy in matters cultural.
The one remaining question is who had been the men who had duped Campanella in such a clever way? They were his fellow Dominicans Niccolò Ridolfi and Niccolò Riccardi—the same prelates who belonged to the Morandi-circle that, precisely in this period, was being investigated by the Inquisition. Apart from preventing their co-religionist to rise to a position of power, for fear of being implicated in this scandal they may well have tried to cover their own tracks while at the same time putting Urban in a position wherein he could not very well act against them.
Astrology: A Priestly Power, a Divine Science?
Obviously, the origins of astrology coincide with the origins of religion. The power to read the stars, and use the knowledge thus acquired to steer one’s life seems to reflect an almost universal hope to evade the disasters, minor and major, that threaten Man’s existence. With the advent of a mechanical vision of the universe, which was part of the advent of science, astrology could not but retain or even increase its power. Might not a cosmos understood as a machine perhaps be even easier influenced by a science that used its very laws, analysed its very rationality?
Always, there had been books, books written by clerics, priests, mostly. And now there came more, still mostly written by priests but increasingly also by non-ecclesiastical scientists. For centuries, libraries had collected such books, as had, inevitably, the Vaticana. Princes had collected them, and cardinals, too: Cardinal Granvelle, the Grand Duke of Tuscany, the Elector of Bavaria all hoped that the astral chains which worked through plants and stones would serve them, or that the alchemy of a man like Paracelsus would help them; indeed, a cardinal-archbishop of Augsburg financed the Italian translation of Paracelsus’s text.70
Many comparable texts were printed in papal Rome, during the 16th century. The learned academicians of the Lincei who formed the milieu into which, from its start in the first years of the 17th century, the rising young prelate Maffeo Barberini had been introduced, while advocating a new view of science as an experimental activity, collected them as well. Men like Federico Cesi and Francesco Stelluti all had their horoscopes cast and they themselves wrote scientific treatises on the wisdom imparted by the stars.71 Often, they used both the arguments of the most hallowed tradition, the Ancient one, by attributing their theories to Aristotle, to Hermes Trismegistos or to Plato, while at the same time referring to the findings of ‘modern’ science, which quickly were acquiring an authority of their own.
In this vein, Tommaso Campanella wrote to his friend Galileo Galilei, in 1614, arguing that he was adding to as well as drawing upon a venerably antique body of empirical data.72 In 1623, Campanella had published La Città del Sole; it was the year of Maffeo’s election to the papacy. It is not at all unlikely that the cardinal-soon-to-be-pope had read this text, and that it had been one of the reasons why Campanella, after his release from the Neapolitan prison, was whisked off to Rome.
For in Campanella’s hierocratic utopia, the astrologer, the priest-king is the man who commands all the sciences: he is the ‘meta-fisico’ and, consequently, the ideal ruler, the law-giver. Using the entire body of his knowledge, including his insight in the movement of the stars which rule the physical world, he succeeds in properly guiding his state, both in its temporal and in its spiritual dimension. Indeed, Campanella had introduced a vision of a “Papa-Sole” and, elsewhere, had argued that “le monarchie delle nationi [would] finirsi nella Romana”,73 suggesting that, in the end, universal power would return to Rome, whence, according to tradition and ideology, it had originated. This, of course, while undoubtedly coinciding with Urban’s own private hopes and aspirations, cleverly played upon most popes’ secret dreams of a ‘universal monarchy’.74 Nor, it should be added, was Campanella the only one to liken the reigning pope to the Sun. Such a tract as Tomaso Tomasi’s Gl’immortali splendori di Urbano is one extended eulogy of the Pope who, as the Sun, the centre of the universe, rules the world.75
Pope Urban read the stars. Francesco Barberini read the stars. Indeed, all members of the Barberini-family read the stars. Manuscripts in their possession would laud the various members of the tribe as stars in a constellation with the Pope as its sunny center. That, of course, was the allegory of power. But other texts show a belief in ‘what is quite clear and does not need proof, viz. that a certain force emanates from heaven, and, descending from those eternal bodies to earth, constantly changes it.’76 In view of the prevailing suspicion of black magic and related practices, the Barberini did try to distinguish between true and false astrology, perhaps especially after Urban’s 1631-astrology bull—of which anon—had been promulgated. True astrology was the study of the heavens’ motions, better called the science of astronomy; false astrology was the effort to use the stars to come to a judgement about one’s life and actions.77 The victory of rationality, or the victory of power?
On another plane, it is remarkable that, at least in the various cases I have studied, the priests involved mostly belonged to the Augustinian or Franciscan Orders, that is, to the oldest Orders of the Church. It is not simple to reason why this should have been so. Of course, these communities, traditionally associated with a mendicant, indeed even vagrant way of life, easily attracted the lower elements of society. Often under false pretences, such men, using the status conferred by the monk’s hood, tried to carve out a living of some comfort, playing on the beliefs and superstitions of the masses. But by the 16th century, these Orders had to share their power with a number of new ones, such as the Jesuits and the Oratorians, to name but a few, who, however, stressed quite a different set of values. While they, too, continued to indulge in various forms of speculation, including astrological/astronomical divination, they couched it in the new language of power, the language of the printed book, the language of science; this definitely helped them establishing themselves in the religious and political forefront of society. Consequently, many who belonged to the old clerical-monastic establishment, and who did not have a background of solid and even scholarly education, must have reacted by turning to such means of power as black magic through astrology and witchcraft in order to retain their position, their power.
Between Two Worldviews
Reconsidering the three interconnected cases that form the basis for this article, it is tempting to conjecture about their general implications.
Obviously, in Roman society, as well as in the Papal States at large, the power of priesthood, vested in the clergy, was extensive. The Council of Trent had done everything to reinforce it, both by strictly supervising the formation of morally secure priests, after so many centuries of discrediting negligence especially in the field of clerical education, and by reasserting the sanctity of the sacerdotal function. Yet, despite fartighter control, especially through the periodical diocesan visitations, one has to admit that by the first decades of the 17th century this policy had been only partially successful.
Meanwhile, the lower clergy especially may have felt its power was diminishing. Indeed, I think the process of bureaucratic centralization of the pope’s temporale in the 16th and early 17th century while aiming to provide it with new, but now centrally controlled weapons, precisely may have undermined some of the clergy’s erstwhile authority. Also, the increasing stress on the importance of education, of learning, as well as the increasing authority of the written word with its unequivocal, universal, controllable applicability may have disconcerted priests who used to rely on ritual and symbolic actions for the exercise of their power in mostly closed rural communities. This may explain why so many clergymen still clung to, or perhaps even returned to practices that might cement their standing in these communities, among believers who were overwhelmingly illiterate. The seven priests involved in the Centini-case and the unnamed number cooperating with the parson of San Carlo obviously were but a small percentage of an urban and even more of a rural clergy who engaged in the arts of black magic.
On the level of the educated clergy, amongst whom, obviously, one must include the early modern popes themselves, there may have been another element introducing emotions of doubt into an erstwhile stable world view. To many, the new sciences, offering explanations that seemed to undermine acknowledged truths and beliefs while simultaneously using the old language of an astrology that for centuries balanced between white and black magic, must have been disconcerting indeed. On the one hand, traditional values were being discredited by some, on the other, new forms of power seemed available to others. Consequently, people may well have felt that an eclectic use of the various instruments of power at hand would help them keep that power in the face of a situation experienced as increasingly unstable and therefore threatening. Hence, one might try to understand Urban’s own vacillations. Unlike his 14th-century predecessor Boniface VIII (1235–1303) who, in a less ‘rational’ age had had no doubts relying on the promises contained in the scientific-magical treatises of his court doctor, Arnaldoda Villanova,78 he was torn between two worldviews. This seems, obviously unintentionally but revealingly, corroborated by the comment on the Centini-case of Theodoro Ameyden, in his rather hostile sketch of the Barberini pontificate. He implies that the Pope had pressed for a harsh verdict precisely because he believed in the consequences of such magical acts as Centini had practised.79
In his weaker moments, Urban may have forgotten the ineluctable theological tenet that it was an act of heresy to try and alter God’s will by influencing the stars. Yet, after the discomfiture of his sessions with Campanella, and probably under pressure of the more rigorist elements among his entourage, he must have decided to, at least publicly, abandon astrology and its concomittant practices.
On April, 1, 1631, the bull Inscrutabilis iudiciorum Dei was published, mostly rephrasing Sixtus’s text of January, 5, 1586, Coeli et Terrae Creator.80 It specifically forbade the use of astrological science—as it still was called—to support any pretence to knowledge of the future, and the use of arcane means to either positively or negatively influence the fate of the living.
Now, Sixtus had written that such forms of knowledge could not be considered “veraces artes aut disciplinae” but were to be condemned as “fallaces et vanae improborum hominum astutiae et daemonium fraudibus introductae.” His bull enumerated the practices people had to be aware of, and ended with a list of the quite severe punishments awaiting those who did not heed his orders.
All this now was repeated by Urban. He, however, stressed the inscrutability of God’s will, thus entering the debate about the status of astrology as magic or science. Also, and quite significantly, he emphasised the criminality of those who speculated about the welfare of the ruler, and promised the utmost severity to those who in one way or another used magical practices to influence the lives of a pope and his relatives. If the culprits were priests, they would be handed to the secular arm, notwithstanding their ecclesiastical immunity.
Campanella’s political versatility which, in a way, mirrored that of his papal patron, is reflected in the fact that himself he was closely involved in establishing the text for Urban’s revised version of Sixtus’ bull.81 Most amazingly, the new text, though in parts even more severe than Sixtus’s words had been, in some parts tried to preserve the possibility of the existence of the ‘good’ or white magic he had developed for Pope Urban. Campanella may well have hoped to thus establish a monopoly of power in this to him all-important field.
In this connection, it is important to return to the problem of dating Centini’s conspiracy. Most sources differ considerably on the actual course of events between Centini’s first contacts with his two accomplices, sometime in the course of the year 1630 and the moment the monk Domenico gave the conspiracy away. It is not improbable the plot already had been revealed in 1631 or 1632 and not, as some sources seem to imply, only in 1633 or 1634.82 Certainly, interrogations started as early as Fall 1633. If this is the case, the Centini-episode may have originated in the same climate that, stemming from the Morandi-revelations, led to the execution of the parish priest of San Carlo. Also, Urban’s decision to reissue a revamped version of the Sistine bull condemning the use of black magic may have been the consequence not only of the scandal surrounding the abbot of Santa Prassede and the ensuing case of the Vicar of San Carlo but also of the first intimations of the Centini-plot; if so the text of the bull explains the severity of the judgements meted out to Centini and his accomplices. Moreover, the problems caused by the earlier Campanella-episode of 1628–1630 would be part of the bull’s background as well.
To illustrate the complexities involved in the parallel existence of two worldviews in Barberini Rome, it is necessary again to cite the Galilei-case, which became a cause célèbre in1631–1632.
Obviously, Urban did not really want Galilei to be punished as severely as, in the end, he was. Indeed, his own inclinations seem to have been against it, as he seems to have been opposed to the exile he had to impose on Campanella. From his first years in Rome, Maffeo Barberini, moving, as an intellectual, among the Roman intellectuals, had been fascinated by Galilei’s research, facilitating and promoting it whenever he could. Galilei, on his part, did not stop lauding Cardinal Barberini and, in various letters, expressed his joy when his protector finally sat on Peter’s chair. He had every reason to be enthusiastic, for Urban continued to show him his favour. But Urban had his enemies and even a pope could not always follow his own inclinations. The Spaniards and the Jesuits, for various and partly different reasons of their own, decided that Urban should be taught a lesson. The publication of Galilei’s Dialogo dei Due Massimi Sistemi in 1632 offered them the excuse they needed.
Urban and his nephew, Cardinal Francesco, who had come to admire Galilei as well, could not prevent that the scholar was brought before the Inquisition’s judges. Yet they did their best to have him convicted on a minor charge, only, instead of being named and punished asan heretic because his materialistic ideas held the real danger of going against the central dogma of transubstantiation.83 Proceedings against Galilei sent shock waves through the world of learning. Peiresc, in a letter to his Roman friend Holstenius, one of Urban’s and Francesco’s favourites, wrote that while he believed ‘these Fathers are handling in good faith, they [yet] will have quite some trouble in convincing the world.’84 Peiresc also, rather daringly, presumed on old friendship and wrote in no unclear terms to Francesco Barberini, warning him of the consequences of Rome’s stance for the reputation of the papacy at large. To no avail. Galilei was found guilty, and the well-deserved fame of the Barberini as patrons of the new sciences as well as the cultural standing of the Holy See itself was indeed tarnished for centuries to come. And yet, a few years later, a man who owed the better part of his scholarly existence to the protection of the Barberini family, was allowed to publish works that in many ways exhibited the views they had once held but had then felt forced to condemn. The learned Jesuit polygraph Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680) tried to re-create the original unity of the world, openly advocating the use of all sciences to regain the lost language, the lost wisdom.
Now, on the whole, the Jesuits were opposed to the ‘old’ languages, the allegories and the symbols, the hieroglyphs and the magical signs, which not only were tainted with heresy but, also, referred to a power they definitely did not want to become widespread; instead, they preferred and propounded rationality and realism, the language of the written, printed word and of images that did not invite multiple interpretations.
But still, here was Kircher, who had been called to Rome by Pope Urban in 1633, publishing, in 1641, his hugely popular book on magnetism that dealt, amongst other things, with magnetism in connection to love, and music. In 1650, in his Musurgia Universalis, he argued, like Campanella had done, that music was poetry, that tones could affect man’s emotions. In subsequent works of vast erudition, combining theology and philosophy, linking Christianity to the equally old or even older religions and traditions of the Near, the Middle and the Far East, Kircher tried to merge them all into one grand concept. He even deciphered, at least to his own and many of his readers’ satisfaction, that most ancient and hence powerful of languages, hieroglyphic, which gained him great fame.
In his works, Kircher very much put himself in the tradition of men like Francesco Patrizi (1529–1597), with his 1591-Nova de universis Philosophia. This was definitely a neo-Platonist work which, consequently, was condemned by the Inquisition85 though it was dedicated to the then pope, while, significantly, I found that Urban held a copy of it in the Barberini Library while Patrizi’s apologies against his defamers are among the Barberini manuscripts, too.86 Kircher also was influenced by a man like the wide-ranging, speculative metaphysical philosopher Giordano Bruno, burned as a heretic in Rome 1600. Inevitably, he followed in the wake of (near) contemporaries like Campanella and Galilei, always, of course, taking care not to advertise his indebtedness to these censored authors. With all these men, he shared an all-encompassing vision of the world and the cosmos. But while, for example, Campanella maintained—at least at some stage in his career—that the primacy of Christianity and hence of the Church could not be argued against the older claims of such texts as the Corpus Hermeticum,87 Kircher, though retracing the development of knowledge to pre-Christian cultures, solidly took a position wherein precisely the Church of Rome was the sole heir to and the guardian of all these traditions, thus claiming for it the power that went with them.88
Admittedly, it seems that papal Rome was not among those states and towns of 17th-century Europe where numerous cases of magic were annually tried. Nor would it be just to credit it with the kind of mentality that produced bloody witch-hunts in Northern and Central Europe.89 Yet, the three connected cases presented here, in their obvious relation to the far more famous cases of Campanella and Galilei, allow us to analyse some basic elements of Roman Baroque culture.
The uses to which astrology and magic were put all related to the craving for power of the people concerned. They wanted to have power over their own lives, to evade its misery, to increase its happiness, if possibly by aspiring after the most powerful positions their society could offer. Urban wanted to postpone his inevitable death. Morandi must have enjoyed the power of being credited with so much power. The priest of San Carlo wanted to be a cardinal, as, indeed, Centini and his accomplices wanted to be cardinals—in Rome, this was the epitome of happiness, the penultimate position of power and, to a single lucky man, the road to ultimate power.
Obviously, the festive, even ritual character of the “abiure” in St. Peter’s and the subsequent executions on Campo de’Fiori was meant to impress, to project a message. It was a message that, in combination with Urban’s 1631-bull, demonstrated papal power, the power to restore social and even cosmic harmony—even though the Campanella and Galilei-cases also showed the limits of this Pope’s power.
First, and foremost, the bull Inscrutabilis iudiciorum Dei as well as the Galilei-verdict and the Campanella-exile told the public about the power of the Church and its ruler. The French scholar Gabriel Naudé perceptively wrote:
On pardonne à Rome aux Athées, aux Sodomites, aux Libertins et àplusieurs autres fripons, mais on ne pardonne iamais à ceux qui mesdisent du Pape ou de la Cour Romaine, ou qui semblent revoquer en doutecette toute-puisance papale.90
Only a few years before the Pope’s death in 1643, Alvise Contarini, Venetian ambassador at the papal court, had reported to his masters that Urban
regola in gran parte le sue attioni con i moti del cielo, dei quali è molto intelligente, ancorché con censure grandissime n’habbi proibito lo studio a tutti—
‘he regulates his life largely according to the motions of the stars, of which he is very knowledgeable, even though by heavy punishment he has forbidden their study to everyone else.’91 That power was at stake, also was expressed by Giacinto Gigli. When, after Urban’s death, he surveyed the Barberini pontificate in a few lines that show both criticism and compassion, he noted the Pope had courted learned and virtuous men and had been well-versed in poetry and rhetoric himself. He added that Urban: “fu anche molto versato nell’Astrologia, ma la prohibì agli altri”: ‘also, he was well-versed in astrology but forbade itsuse to others.’92 Would he have written this, some sixteen years after the Campanella-episode, if people had not been convinced the Pope had continued to be inclined to use the power of the stars himself, but very much also to prevent others from doing so as well?
In the 1630’s, Urban gave in to those who wanted him to act against such forms of power as ‘ancient’ astrology and the ‘new’ sciences.These men acted from a variety of reasons; some may have feared these forms of power threatened to move away from papal control, others undoubtedly felt threatened in their deepest-felt beliefs.
Yet, while Urban was well aware he could no longer allow himself publicly to be connected with men like Campanella and Galilei, who had become a liability rather than an asset, instead of imprisoning the former, he permitted his ‘escape’ to France, and allowed the latter to come out of his predicaments as lightly as possible: with a comfortable house arrest. On the other hand, the Morandi- and Centini-cases show that, definitely, the Pope did not tolerate those who proposed to use these powers to threaten him.
For another ten years, Urban himself continued in his ways. Whether he really identified himself with the all-powerful chief magus who ruled Campanella’s ‘City of the Sun’ cannot be ascertained, but the image of a priest-king who, through the science of the stars, partook of divine knowledge cannot have been far from his mind. Still, though the Pope wanted supreme power through whatever means, if necessary the forbidden language of magic, black or white, in which he continued to believe if we accept Ameyden’s and Contarini’s estimate, he certainly did not want to share this language and its power with his subjects.
Consequently, the Church used the instrument of the Index firmly to control the reading habits of its flock. An enormous number of books were forbidden food, at least to the common man. However, those who were close to the centre of power were, by degrees, allowed to share in its wider knowledge. The papal relatives, led by Cardinal-Padrone Francesco, were given numerous titles of exemption, absolving them from the punishment involved in reading this or that forbidden book. Hence, with the help of such well-informed librarians as Suarez and Holste and their contacts with ‘heretic’ authors and book-sellers, the libraries of the Barberini were, indeed, well stocked with texts exploring ancient lore and all kinds of magic: the owners could share in whatever esoteric wisdom and power these texts might impart. Not surprisingly, the Barberini owned, besides a number of Kabbala-manuscripts, a voluminous compendium of the same texts of D’Abano that had been used by Centini’s accomplices, and of all kind of treatises explaining in great detail the exact procedure one should follow when consulting with the spirits of the nether world.93
The message of Urban’s 1631-bull and the related occurrences also told the public about the Church’s role in the restoration of harmony between earth and heaven. Even criminals of the basest sort who had conspired against God’s vicar on earth, deserved some kind of lastrites when beginning their voyage to the other world. The fact that so many manuscript versions survive both of Centini’s last moments in this world and of his last letters, documenting his hope of ultimate salvation, indicates what double message the authorities tried to project, to the Pope’s subjects and, indeed, to all believers. One may even wonder whether, specifically, Centini’s farewell-letters were not partly or wholly fabricated by the Curial authorities to ensure the effectiveness of a message that certainly meant to instil the proper feelings in an audience who had to be convinced of the essential wickedness of the actions perpetrated by this man.
Having confessed his crime, Centini was allowed to expiate his sins through his punishment at the hands of the powers of his world, the Church. His much-applauded courage could be interpreted as proof positive that he accepted the Church’s power in this domain. Having asked Heaven’s forgiveness, through the prayers of his relatives and his appeal to the Pope, he also showed his belief in the power of the religion of which the Pope was the supreme representative on earth. But of course, there was one thing even the Pope could not guarantee. Ultimately, only God’s mercy would decide whether Centini would be saved.
See endnotes and bibliography at source.
Chapter 8 (336-375) from Power and Religion in Baroque Rome: Barberini Cultural Policies, by Peter Rietbergen (Brill Academic Publishers, 01.01.2006), published by OAPEN under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic license.
