CHAPTER XV

AT FRANKFURT AND ZURICH
The Free City of Frankfurt-on-the-Main was one of the most important places in Germany. The Golden Bull of 1356 constituted it the seat of Imperial Election. It was a renowned centre of trade, and twice a year, at Eastertide and at Michaelmas, merchants from every country were to be found at its famous fair. It stood first in the bookselling and printing trade of Germany. A member of the Protestant party, its city-fathers found it commercially advantageous to tolerate Roman Catholics and all the factions of the revolt against Rome, even the Socinian faction. An evil reputa- tion indeed must have preceded Bruno, for we find it recorded in the Book of the Burgomaster, July 2nd, 1590,^ that when he begged permission to dwell in the house of Wechel, the printer, it was " Resolved that his petition be refused and that he be told to take his penny elsewhere."
Printers were erudite men in those days, and scholars and statesmen foregathered at their shops, which were true intellectual centres where the latest books were seen and discussed, where news and ideas came in from abroad and dilettante courtiers could meet and gossip. The printers were in the habit, not only of lodging travelling scholars while they were printing their books, but of taking travelling nobles as boarders ; for the great scholars usually preferred seclusion to the honour and profit of receiving guests who were likely to disturb their studies and households, even if
1 No. 160, p. 48.
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they should be well-paid for the service.^ Sidney had been the guest of the Wechels, and it is possible that Bruno was enabled to get a footing with them by reason of the two books he had dedicated to one whose chivalrous behaviour on the field of Warnsfeld, followed by his death, not only made him the idol of his countrymen but added additional glory to a name which was already famous throughout Europe. John Wechel contrived, in spite of the prohibi- tion, to get Bruno received at the Carmelite monastery, and provided him with means of support.* Jacobus Brictanus,* a middle-aged man who was born at Antwerp, but who had settled as a bookseller at Venice, told the Inquisitors that he had met and talked with Bruno at Frankfurt and at divers other places. Bruno had never spoken to him about Christianity or Catholicism, but the Prior of this Carmelite monastery told him that " he was chiefly occupied in writ- ing and in the vain and chimerical imagining of novelties. Heretic doctors read with him ; for in that city they are mostly heretical." The innovator and " awakener " could not fail to produce misgivings and discomfort among the good fathers, and one is not surprised to learn that when Brictanus asked the Prior what manner of man Bruno might be, he was told that " he was a man of fine intellect and erudition — a universal man — but he " (the Prior) " did not believe him to possess a trace of religion ; adding that he professed to know more than did the Apostles and could, if he wished, make the whole world of one religion." * Asked who were his intimate friends, Brictanus could not mention any. So Bruno would seem to have experienced that mental isolation which is the usual lot of the original, or
^ Erpenii Thomae, De Perigrinatione Gallica, 1631, pp. 6, 12. — Bourne, H. R. Fox, op. cit., p. 91. ^ Doc. ix.
' The Italians called him Giacomo Bertano {Doc. /.). How they spelled his name in his native Flanders, I do not know.
* Doc. vi.
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even of the merely independent, thinker! Giambattista Ciotto, a young Sienese of 27, who kept a bookshop in the Merceria, the chief street of Venice, under the sign of Minerva, and through whose agency much evil was to follow, saw a good deal of Bruno during the fairs. But he, too, though later on Bruno frequented his shop in Venice, never heard him say anything which could arouse suspicion as to his not being a good Catholic.^
At the Fairs, Bruno would find himself face to face with all sorts and conditions of men, and in intellectual touch with all that was most vigorous in European thought and life.
The first work of Bruno's printed by Wechel and Fischer, De triplici Minima et Mensura, was dedicated to Duke Henry Julius of Brunswick. The dedication was not by the author but by the printers. It is dated Feb. 13th, 1591, and states that Bruno was " forced by an unexpected event to leave the city when only the last leaf remained for him to finish, and, being unable to correct this as he had done to the rest of the work, he wrote asking us to complete in his name the labour forbidden to him by fate." We are in darkness as to what had happened. It may have been that the City Fathers were about to follow up their resolution by ejection ; * or it may have been that an invitation from the lord of Elgg necessitated a hurried (and, perhaps, prudent) departure. John Henry Hainzell, of a literate Augsburg family, had just acquired the estate of Elgg, near Zurich. Hainzell studied alchemy, was greatly inclined to the un- canny and mysterious, and exercised a noble hospitality to thinkers and especially to those who claimed acquaintance with the border-land of exact knowledge.^ Bruno now
• Doc. V.
' This is Sigwart's suggestion. Cfr. Kleine Schriften I. ' Sigwart, C. von ; Kleine Schriften, 1889, I, p. 123. Hainzell's passion for alchemy and alchemists proved his ruin.
AT FRANKFURT AND ZURICH 223
wrote for Hainzell a last book on LuUianism and Mne- monics, which appeared at the Michaelmas Frankfurt Fair.^ He also taught at Zurich, a great trading-centre, the wealth of which had been much increased since 1555 by the in- dustry of Protestant Italians — silk-weavers who had been exiled from Locarno. Although Zurich had no university, it was the intellectual capital of Switzerland and the heart of the Swiss Confederation. Here resided at the time a freeman of the city, one Raphael Eglin, who became one of Bruno's pupils. Eglin had been expelled from the Grisons, whither he had gone to organize schools, and Bruno handed over to him the substance of his lectures, which remained unprinted until 1595, when Eglin had them issued from the press of John Wolff of Zurich.* But the first edition con- tained only a portion of the lectures. Later, in 1609, when Eglin was Professor of Theology at Marburg (the University which had refused Bruno permission to teach) he had the Summa reprinted with additions.^
Bruno spent three or four months with Hainzell, but we find him back again at Frankfurt on Mar. 7th, 1591, when he received permission to print the already printed work De Triplici Minima Et Mensura.* He stayed at his old quarters, the Carmelite monastery, about six months.® In the brief account of his life which Bruno gave at his trial, he passed over the first visit to Frankfurt and his sojourn with the lord of Elgg and recorded his second visit only. The first visit was a very short although eventful one ; to have been the willing guest of one who indulged in dubious arts
1 De imaginum compositione.
' Summa terminorum metaphysicorum. Bruno was lying in the prison of the Roman Inquisition at the time.
^ Accessit ejusdem Praxis Descensus etc. Ex officina Rud. Hundtwelkeri. For Eglin, see Brunnhofer, G. B ; Weltanschauung und Verhdngniss, Leipzig, 1882, ^.81.
♦ Censur Register. ^ Doc. ix.
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might have prejudiced his case with the judges.^ " Some- times Prudence hides the truth with her skirts in order to escape blame and outrage." ^
There is no record of permission having been given for the publication of De Monade, with its far more important and larger adjunct, De Immenso, or of De Co^npositione, but both volumes bear the date 1591, and we learn from Bassaus' Catalogue of Frankfurt books that they were ready for the Michaelmas Fair. The first of these volumes was dedicated, like the De Triplici Minimo, " to the very illustrious and reverend prince Henry Julius, duke of Brunswick and Luneberg, bishop of Halberstadt," and all were printed by the partners John Wechel and Peter Fischer.
In the Golden Book of Venice, wherein the families of the oligarchy were inscribed, stood the noble house of Mocenighi, so distinguished that it gave three doges to the State in the 15th century and one in the i6th. "One day," deposed Giambattista Giotto, the bookseller, " Signor Giovanni Mocenigo, a patrician of Venice, when he was buying a recent work of Giordano's,* asked me if I knew him, and if I knew where he was staying. I told him that I had seen him at Frankfurt and believed he was still there ; whereupon the said Sig. Mocenigo added, ' I should like him to come to Venice to teach me the secrets of memory and the other things which he professes, as one may see in this book.' To this I answered, ' It is believable that, if besought, he will come.' Some days afterwards, Sig. Mocenigo brought me a letter addressed to the said
' Cfr. G. B. Op. Lot. {State edition), vol. Ill, p. xxix.
' Spaccio, II, iij.
' From the MS. it would seem that Ciotto first said the work was the Eroici Furori — this name is erased and De Minimo, Magna et mensura (sic) substituted for it. Evidently Ciotto had no clear memory of what work it was.
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Giordano, beseeching me to deliver it and saying that he wrote to ask him if he would come to Venice." ^
Bruno's account runs : " Being in Frankfurt last year, I received two letters from Sig. Giovanni Mocenigo, inviting me to Venice to teach him the art of memory and discovery, with promises to treat me well, and that I should be satis- fied with him." ^
Now Bruno had not always misjudged concerning what might befall him. In England he wrote of " the procession of 50 or 100 torches in broad mid-day that would not be lacking in a Roman Catholic country."* But he had dwelt in Roman Catholic countries and been less subject to the molestation and oppression which he experienced at Geneva, Marburg and Helmstedt. Venice like Frankfurt was a centre of trade, and the love of lucre so prevailed over the love of God that heretics found a fairly safe asylum there. She was a city renowned for her intellectual and artistic force and the beautiful productions of her printers, to whom much liberty was allowed. Many of the books published in Venice were condemned by Rome, though, indeed, this was largely due to the efforts of a rival press to secure monopoly. Venice alone among Italian States had preserved her independence of foreign Catholic Powers; she alone had resisted resolutely and, in the main, successfully the encroachments of the Papacy on civil liberty. LuUism was at the time a fashionable craze among the rich young dilettanti of Venice ; so there was prospect of lucrative occupation.* Bruno had received a renewed invitation from a member of a renowned and powerful house, and was offered protection. He may have known that Giovanni Mocenigo, a man now entering on middle life (he was 34 ^), had been one of the Assessors
1 Doc. V. * Doc. vij. ° Cena, Dial. V.
* Sigwart, op. cit., p. 302. ° Doc. iij.
P
2 26 GIORDANO BRUNO
of the State to the Inquisition ; if so, surely an invitation from such a source ensured safety. Bruno never regarded himself as other than a Roman Catholic. So secure did he feel that even when he found himself trapped he felt no serious misgivings. " I shall tell the truth," he said to the Inquisitors. " Often I have been threatened with being brought before the Holy Office and ever did I deem it a joke ; wherefore I am ready to give an account of myself." He entertained the extraordinary delusion that he could induce the Church to receive him again and allow him to dwell unmolested and outside his order in his own beloved province.-^ Not all his bitter experience had taught him the invincible, terrific power which is achieved over the minds and actions of most men by doctrines early instilled and forti- fied by habit, tradition, general consent and authoritative pressure ; how feeble is the mere intellect to overthrow passionate bigotry or push aside passionate ignorance or calm the resentment of menaced power.
He had written of himself as " citizen and servant of the world, child of the sun and mother earth";* he was, he said, no mere stranger and out of place in foreign lands, but, as a member of the Divine Universe, could share its life in any place. He said this with his head ; his heart throbbed for home. Venice might prove a stepping stone towards his never forgotten and dearly loved Campagna. Once in Venice, might he not, by discreet conduct and working through men of influence, return to his native soil? In a fatal moment he resolved to trust to the honour of a Venetian patrician and to the historic inde- pendence of the Venetian State.
1 Docs, ix, X. » Spaccio, Epist. Esplic.