XXII. CALVIN’S BIOGRAPHERS AND APOLOGISTS 528 APPENDIX 535 BOOK I. EARLY LIFE--WORKS--ARREST AND TRIAL AT VIENNE CHAPTER I. MICHAEL SERVETUS, HIS BIRTH, PARENTAGE, AND EARLY EDUCATION. Michael Serveto, or as we know him best by his name with the Latin termination, Servetus, appears, from the most trustworthy information we possess, to have been born either at Tudela, in the old Spanish kingdom of Navarre, or at Villaneuva, in that of Aragon; but whether here or there, and in the year 1509 or 1511, is an open question. In the course of the Trial he stood at Vienne in Dauphiny, in the spring of 1553, he says himself that he is a native of Tudela, and forty-two years of age; which would make Navarre the country, and 1511 the year, of his birth. But in the Geneva Trial, only four months later, he declares that he is of Villanova, and forty-four years old; which would give us Aragon as the land, and 1509 as the date, of his nativity. When he spoke of himself as a Navarrese at Vienne, it may have been done to conciliate his French judges, Navarre having once been a province of France, and the natives of the two countries having still much in common. It was at a moment, too, when he had paramount motives for seeking to conceal his identity. When he said at Geneva that he was ‘Espagnol Arragonois de Villeneuve’ and forty-four, he was face to face with one who knew him well, and when he had neither motive nor opportunity for concealment. Servetus’s subscription of himself as ‘Michael Serveto, alias Revés, de Aragonia, Hispanus,’ on the title-page of his first work; as ‘Michael Villanovanus,’ on the titles of all the books he edited, and the name ‘Villeneuve’ by which alone he was known through the whole of the years he lived in France, to say nothing of the ‘M. S. V.,’ evidently Michael Servetus Villanovanus, on the last leaf of the ‘Christianismi Restitutio,’ the printing of which led to his death, supply, as it seems, preponderating evidence as to the place of his birth, though the year may still be left uncertain. The _alias_ Revés which appears on the title of the book ‘De Trinitatis Erroribus,’ the first-fruits of his genius, has hitherto been a puzzle and subject of debate with his biographers, but can now be satisfactorily interpreted. Servetus’s mother, it appears, was of French extraction, of the Revés family, and her son took occasion in his first work piously to preserve his mother’s family name beside his proper patronymic.[1] Of the parents of Servetus, however, we in fact know little more than that we have from himself when, on his trial at Geneva, he informed the Court that they were _d’ancienne race, vivants noblement_, of old families and independent, or in easy circumstances, and that his father was a Notary by profession. Report adds that he was of a family which had been jurists for generations, and that his father