Chapter Four

chapter four SURVEILLANTS OF MINORITIES 1. Freethinkers and Dissenters Renaissance Italy was not a land of heretics. There were, of course, occasional freethinkers, especially among the radical Aristotelians who taught natural philosophy in the faculties of arts of the universities. These often toyed with ideas that inquisitors found perturbing: athe- ism, the mortality of the human soul, the denial of miracles and divine providence, the purely human character of religions including Chris- tianity, magical themes. But they usually did so with much-publicized, emphatic declarations—sincere or otherwise—that they were doing so solely in a hypothetical, speculative manner and that the truth on these matters was to be found undoubtedly in the teachings of the Catholic faith. Their coy intellectual daring was accompanied often by a gener- ous dose of anticlericalism—aimed, in the first place, against the friars, whom they generally referred to as the cucullati, the ‘hooded ones’, by which they meant to allude not so much to the friars’ cowls as to their allegedly closed minds. We have seen, in chapter 2, an extreme example of such as these in the Tiberio Russelliano who so irritated and antag- onized, and ultimately had the better of, the inquisitor of Parma and Reggio, Girolamo Armellini da Faenza. A far more significant example is provided by Pietro Pomponazzi who in 1516, when he was professor of natural philosophy in the Uni- versity of Bologna, quickly drew the attention of the inquisitor of Bolog- na, Eustachio Piazzesi da Bologna, with the claim that Aristotle had taught the mortality of the human soul. The case is certainly arrest- ing, for despite the efforts of the inquisitor of Bologna and his vicars, such as Giovanni Torfanini, and even those of Prierias, at the time mas- ter of the sacred palace in Rome, Pomponazzi came through it quite unscathed. He managed this by pointing out, in a rather provocative manner, that the thesis was also held by the most eminent Dominican theologian of the time, Cardinal Cajetan, and, especially, by adroitly securing the benign intervention of one of his former students who 120 chapter four by then had become inquisitor of Piacenza and Cremona, Crisostomo Iavelli da Casale. But the case of Pomponazzi has been already the object of ample scholarly attention and its unfolding has been recon- structed adequately.1 There is little need to consider it once again here. Theological dissenters were also, at times, the objects of inquisitorial concern. These were quickly brought to heel, as with the Pietro da Lucca discussed in chapter 2, whose bizarre, albeit pious, theological speculations aroused the indignation of the inquisitor of Mantua, Domenico Pirri da Gargnano, and the Gabriele da Salò, considered in the same chapter, whose scandalous heterodoxies were immediately targeted by the inquisitor of Bologna, Giovanni Cagnazzo da Taggia. But, all in all, such as these were little more than momentary nuisances to inquisitors during the Renaissance. Of greater concern to inquisitors were the two principal groups of religious outcasts of Renaissance Italy: the Waldensians, and the Jews and purported Judaizers. This chapter will focus, then, on inquisitors whose principal task was their surveil- lance. 2. The Waldensians By 1474 the various heterodox movements whose threat had first in- duced the popes at the beginning of the thirteenth century to entrust inquisitorial activities in northern Italy to the Dominican order had been almost completely extirpated. Almost completely, because while Cathars, Patarines, Dulcinians and Fraticelli of various hues had long since disappeared as significant, popular phenomena, the Waldensians, an evangelical movement that had first emerged around 1170 as the Poor of Lyons founded by a certain Waldo (or Valdès), still survived, isolated in their remote mountain valleys of western Piedmont (the valleys of the Cottian Alps) as well as in the valleys of the Dauphinese Alps, in the south-east of present-day France.2 Throughout the four- teenth century and during the first three quarters of the fifteenth, the Waldensians continued to be the object of sporadic inquisitorial attention. The history of this continuing, although only episodic, persecu- 1 See Tavuzzi 1995 and Tavuzzi 1997,pp.97–104. 2 For a general history of the Waldensians see Audisio 1999..

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