ought to be prevented from preaching, and should be deprived of their
revenues, because the world was befouled by them--they were asses,
and the doctrines of the Church asses' beliefs, and so on. The arrest
was on the following night (Sunday night), and on the Monday a second
denunciation was entered by Mocenigo, than which there is no more
pitiful self-revelation of meanness and hypocrisy extant. He confesses
or rather boasts that, on locking up Bruno, he had recited the charges
he would make against him, "hoping to coerce him into revealing his
secrets," _i.e._ the Secret Arts. Bruno's only reply had been to ask
for his liberty, to say that he had not really intended to leave, but
was still ready to teach Mocenigo everything he knew, to work for him
("to be my slave," said Mocenigo), without any further recognition,
and to give him anything that he had in the house; only he asked to
have returned him a copy of a book of _conjurations_ that Mocenigo had
found among his written papers and had appropriated. To explain his
delay in accusing Bruno, Mocenigo professed not to have been able to
get enough against the latter until he had the philosopher in his own
house two months earlier (viz. in March), "and then I wished to get the
good of him, and by the steps I took I was able to assure myself that
he would not leave without telling me of it. _All the time I promised
myself to bring the matter before the censorship of the Holy Office._"
These denouncements were confirmed on oath by Mocenigo, whose age is
given at thirty-four years, so that the excuse of youth falls from
him. The following Tuesday the Holy Tribunal met to consider the case.
It consisted, in Venice, of the Papal Nuncio (Ludovico Taberna), the
Patriarch of Venice (Lorenzo Priuli),[112] the Father Inquisitor (John
Gabrielli of Saluzzo, _de Salutiis_),[113] along with three assessors
or representatives of the State (_Savii all' Eresia_), one of whom was
always present, with the right of suspending the meeting if he thought
proper: at the present time the three were Aloysius Fuscari, Sebastian
Barbadico, and Tomaso Morosini. On this day the evidence of Ciotto and
Bertano, the booksellers who had known Bruno at Frankfort as well as
at Venice (Bertano was also at Zürich), was taken; it was in the main
favourable, only Bertano recalled the prior of the Carmelite monastery
at Frankfort having said of Bruno that he spent most of his time in
writing, and went about dreaming dreams and meditating new things, that
he had a fine mind and knowledge of letters, and was a _universal_
man, but that he had no religion so far as the prior knew, and he
quoted a saying of Bruno's to the effect that the apostles did not
know everything, and that he had the mind, if he wished, to make all
the world of one religion; while Ciotto reported the common belief in
Frankfort that Bruno was a man of _no religion_.
[Sidenote: First examination of Bruno.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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