Chapter 6
PIETY AND INTRIGUE IN AN ERA OF NEW DISEASES
William Eamon
*I am indebted to Elizabeth Horodowich for her critical comments on an early draft of this essay. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are mine.
On a cold January day in 1567, two men, one a Dominican friar called Antonio Volpe, the other a servant in the house of a local nobleman, were walking in the Campo San Lio not far from the Ponte Rialto in Venice. Pausing near a baker’s shop in the tiny square, they were suddenly approached by guards wearing the insignia of the Holy Office of the Inquisition. As the captain of the guards grasped Volpe’s arm, the friar turned to his companion and cried out, “I’m ruined [assassinato]! May God help me!” His friend, perhaps hoping to distance himself from the friar in the eyes of the guards, responded, “Padre, if you’re a good man, God will help you; but should you be otherwise, so much the worse for you.”1 Fra Volpe was quickly led to a boat docked nearby and conducted to the Holy Office’s prison at the church of San Giovanni in Bragora. A few days later he was transferred to the offices of the Inquisition in Padua, since it was there that the charges against him had been filed. There he learned the full details of the accusations against him: that secretly he was a Lutheran, that he owned heretical books, and that he was planning to throw off his habit and emigrate to Germany. Other charges would emerge in the course of the proceedings, which dragged out for another thirteen months as Volpe languished in the Inquisition’s prison while his case was being prosecuted.
[157]Antonio Volpe’s trial was in many ways typical of those encountered in the archives of the Venetian Inquisition. Like most inquisitorial proceedings, his troubles began with a denunciation filed with the Holy Office. Having received a denunciation, the Inquisition then decided whether or not to follow it up.2 This process could take several months, as the accuser and other witnesses were interrogated to determine whether the case merited further action. In Volpe’s case, however, the denunciation was filed just two weeks prior to his arrest. The fact that a capitano of the Holy Office was sent to arrest the friar suggests that the inquisitors thought that his case was particularly grave or that they had reason to believe that he might flee; normally, when a decision was made to proceed with a case, the suspect was sent a citation to appear in court.
Fra Volpe was a familiar figure around Venice. A native of Ferrandina, in Lucania, a poor region in the far south of Italy, he was a famous preacher whose sermons at the Dominican church in Gambarare, near Padua, were said to have “moved people to tears of devotion.” But he was even more celebrated for the medicines that he made at a distillery in the Campo dei Frari and sold at the San Marco pharmacy. Most Venetians simply called him the “Canker Friar” (il Frate del Cancaro) because he had remedies for the sores caused by Mal francese, the French disease, that were widely sought after and considered to be very effective. The French pox—in modern terminology, syphilis—was a new disease in Volpe’s time, having first appeared in Europe in the late fifteenth century.3 Although today syphilis is a relatively mild and treatable malady, it was a terrible scourge in the sixteenth century. Erasmus reckoned no disease to be more contagious, more terrible for its victims, or more difficult to cure. “It’s a most presumptuous pox,” exclaimed a character in one of his Colloquies. “In a showdown, it wouldn’t yield to leprosy, elephantiasis, ringworm, gout, or sycosis.”4 Like the plague, with which it was often confused, its origins were mysterious and it struck without warning, claiming victims of every social station. Fra Volpe’s clients, men and women alike, included patricians like Jacomo Badoer as well as countless poor people that he treated at the Ospedaletto at San Marco. People also consulted the friar for eye ailments and skin rashes. Rumor was that barbers and empirics would do almost anything to get hold of his secrets.
As with all of its cases, the Holy Office kept a detailed record of Volpe’s trial. The proceeding, which is found in a lengthy dossier in the Archivio di Stato in Venice, is a fairly typical inquisitorial file. It consists of three bound folders, the first containing the initial examination of Volpe, the second [158]containing testimony against him, and the third his defense. Scattered among the folders, in an apparently random fashion (doubtless reflecting the casual rearrangement of a succession of readers), are dozens of loose documents, letters, and testimony. Inevitably, gaps remain, as they do in most archival records. As anyone who has read an inquisitorial file knows, the archive does not present a clear and unambiguous narrative. Therefore the historian must intervene, interpret, extrapolate, and create a story.
This essay will create that story, first of all about piety and healing in an era of new diseases; treachery, too, will be part of the tale, for Fra Volpe had made powerful and influential enemies who stood to benefit from his downfall. But there are really two parallel stories: one about the unfortunate Dominican friar, Antonio Volpe, and the other about how early modern people attempted to understand and arm themselves against the threat of new and mysterious diseases.
The period between the onset of the Black Death and the end of the sixteenth century—from 1347 until 1600—was an era of new diseases. During this span of approximately two hundred fifty years, not only did Europe experience its most devastating demographic upheaval as a result of the rapid, epidemic spread of a new sickness the Europeans called the Black Death, but it was struck by a succession of new infectious diseases, including typhus, syphilis, virulent smallpox, and the mysterious “English sweat.”
Retrospective diagnosis is fraught with danger and no disease illustrates the danger better than the Black Death. No dogma is more firmly imbedded in medieval and early modern history than the claim that the sickness known as the Black Death was bubonic plague. Yet this notion has been repeatedly challenged and with good reasons.5 As a number of historians have pointed out, the signs, symptoms, and epidemiology of the Black Death do not match that of modern bubonic plague. Most notably, medieval observers never mentioned an epizootic of rats, a precondition for bubonic plague. Moreover, the horrific mortality rates recorded for the medieval plague are much higher than that of modern plagues. Finally, contemporaries do not ever seem to have doubted that the Black Death was an extremely contagious disease. Boccaccio’s famous story of the pigs that dropped dead after rummaging through the rags of infected persons is one of the indelible images of the Black Death.6 Yet such an occurrence could never have happened if the disease were bubonic plague as it is now known, because plague is not particularly contagious, but instead is passed to humans from fleas infected by diseased rats.
Plague (if that is in fact what the Black Death was) was not the only new disease that struck Europe in this era of new diseases. In fact, by Fra Volpe’s time it was already an old and familiar disease, having ravaged Europe for over two centuries. Yet there were many other epidemic diseases that struck with nearly equal ferocity, so many in fact that contemporaries referred to them all, simply, as peste.7
“Plague” hardly begins to carry a sense of the infinite variety of afflictions that word conveyed. Peste referred not only to bubonic plague but also to influenza, typhus, meningitis, smallpox, and a host of other diseases—in fact, to virtually any disease that contemporaries regarded as contagious or widespread. Neither do the myriad names contemporaries used to distinguish one form of peste from another (pestilenzia, morìa, mal de zucho [or malzucho], for example) help much in identifying early epidemics in modern medical terms. Often epidemics coexisted with other contagious and chronic illnesses, making identification in modern terms extremely difficult.8 During the epidemic of 1528 that raged in the Po Valley, contemporaries reported four different pesti occurring simultaneously.9
Although epidemic typhus is an ancient disease, it was a newcomer to Renaissance Europe, having first appeared during the 1490s. Another, more widespread outbreak occurred in Italy in 1527 and 1528, with cases reported from Naples to Milan.10 The Italian physician Girolamo Fracastoro’s detailed description of the 1527 epidemic, in his De contagione of 1546, reads almost like a textbook account of typhus: fever and fatigue followed by general prostration and delirium in the first few days; then the body erupted into a general rash that looked like flea-bites or, in some cases, spots about the size of lentils, the characteristic symptom that gave the disease its contemporary Italian name, mal di petecchie or “spotted sickness.”11 Spread by human body lice, typhus is a disease of famine and squalid living conditions. Its telltale sign, a rash of red spots about the size of lentils, has led many historians to confuse it with the plague. But since the conditions that let down the bar for one type of infection usually admit a great many others, “pestilences”—or plagues—in the Renaissance were usually composed of a number of different types of transmissible diseases.
One of the great puzzles of epidemiological history was the sudden appearance, and just as mysterious disappearance, of the so-called English sweating sickness (sudor anglicus), which first broke out in 1485.12 Subsequent outbreaks occurred in 1508, 1517, 1528, and 1551, all in England. It was a most astonishing disease, spectacular in the manner in which it [160]claimed its hosts. Suddenly attacked by a high fever and profuse sweating, victims lapsed into a coma and died within 24 hours. It is hard to imagine the fear that must have been caused by a sickness that, as Edward Hall reported in 1517, “killed some within two hours, some merry at dinner and dead at supper.”13 No one knows what the sweat was. An arbovirus infection—a disease spread by an insect vector—seems to accord best with the epidemiological data.
Prior to the mid-sixteenth century, measles and smallpox were both described as relatively mild infections of childhood, as can be gathered from observations by the ninth-century Muslim physicians Rhazes and Avicenna.14 Girolamo Fracastoro wrote that smallpox, chicken pox, and measles “seem to attack everyone once in life.”15 Smallpox epidemics were rare in Europe before the 1560s, when the disease suddenly broke out in a virulent, epidemic form. The first major European epidemic occurred in 1570 in Venice, where it claimed almost 10,000 victims.16 In other words, prior to the 1560s, the Europeans knew only a relatively benign strain of the smallpox virus, presumably Variola minor, which claims less than 1 percent mortality rates. Variola major, virulent smallpox, evidently did not exist in Europe before that time.
While Europe was spared the ravages of deadly smallpox, a disease that was undoubtedly smallpox was introduced into the New World by the Spanish conquistadores, and would within a generation destroy from one-third to a half of the indigenous population.17 How a nonvirulent strain of smallpox could have caused such high mortality among the Amerindians is still something of an epidemiological puzzle. It is possible, on the one hand, that the benign form of smallpox that Europeans knew underwent an early mutation that exposed a more virulent agent to the Native Americans. Or alternatively, the radically different response of Amerindians to Variola minor might be explained by genetic differences between Native Americans and Europeans (due presumably to a marked founder effect in the Americas) that made the indigenous population more susceptible to the disease.
The New World gave much in return for what it received from the Old World.18 One of America’s most important gifts to Europe was the disease that Renaissance physicians called Morbus gallicus, the French disease, or what moderns term syphilis.19 The disease first appeared in Europe in the [161]1490s. It was first noticed in Spain, whence, presumably, Columbus’s sailors carried it on their return from the New World. From there it was transported to Italy with the Spanish armies quartered in southern Italy during the battle of Naples in 1494. It gained its name from the erroneous belief that the Italians contracted the disease from the invading French, whose “armies of loose morals and loose discipline” had invaded the peninsula. The French, though, called it the Neapolitan disease, since they believed they caught it from the Italians.20
Whatever its origins, the French pox was an “opportunity disease,” a sickness that an ambitious healer could exploit for profit and reputation. The physicians had little to offer by way of a cure. They argued about whether the disease was new or ancient; initially because plague was a universal paradigm for epidemic disease, many thought the French pox was some new and more horrifying form of the plague. They debated whether it came from the New World or from somewhere else and so on, but they couldn’t agree on a mode of treatment. It didn’t seem to fit the Galenic model, which made some wonder whether it was a disease at all. Orthodox Renaissance medicine had much to say about the pox, but seemed powerless in the face of it.
Meanwhile, empirics and popular healers entered the picture.21 Few of them doubted the pox was curable. Indeed, nearly all of them had a special potion or surefire remedy for it. And why not? Finding a cure for the pox was the Renaissance healer’s pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, and in the competition for cures, the natural history of syphilis gave the advantage to the empiric. Victims of the disease suffered from excruciating pain in the joints, pain so intense that patients “screamed day and night without respite, envying the dead themselves,” according to Sigismondo dei Conti, the papal secretary, who was able to observe the effects of the disease in the papal court.22 Sores and swellings erupted and spread all over the body, leaving hideous black scabs. It was said that those afflicted with the French pox were more repugnant than lepers.
But these horrifying initial symptoms usually subsided in a few weeks, resulting in a period of remission that could last as long as six to eight weeks. Thus the sickness seemingly “healed” spontaneously, only to return much later with new and ever more horrifying symptoms. As the infection progressed in its inevitable march toward death, it consumed the flesh, eating away the nose and face. Victims of the disease, called malfranciosati, [162]stank from putrefaction. Even their physicians would not touch them, reported the German knight Ulrich von Hutten.23 Malfranciosati lying in the streets or dragging themselves along on little trolleys, begging for food from passersby, were a common sight in the streets of the major Italian cities, a sight that was repulsive to nearly everyone who encountered them.24 Yet for a brief moment between the remission of the primary symptoms of the disease and the onset of its secondary symptoms, patients experienced a relief that seemed heaven-sent, and that was a circumstance empirics could use to their advantage.
From the standpoint of the medical marketplace, the new plague was a disease that favored bold specifics. The most popular cure for Mal francese was guaiac (also known as lignum sanctum and lignum vitae), a New World tree whose bark and wood was ground into a powder and boiled into a strong infusion, of which the patient drank copious amounts while confined to a closed and heated chamber for at least thirty days.25 A sudorific, guaiac caused patients to literally sweat the sickness out. Ulrich von Hutten praised the virtues of the treatment, which to him underscored the inability of orthodox medicine to deal with the disease.26 Speaking from experience as a victim of syphilis, Hutten attacked the physicians for being more concerned with arguing about the causes of the illness than with finding ways to treat it. By the middle of the sixteenth century, the popularity of the guaiac regimen was overshadowed by another, even more potent specific—mercury.27 Applied in an ointment or taken internally, mercury’s effects on the body were dramatic. Rabelais, in the prologue to Pantagruel, painted a memorable picture of pox victims, “well anointed and thoroughly greased, with their faces shining like a larder lock-plate and their teeth rattling like the keys on the manual of an organ or a spinet when it is being played, and their gullets foaming like a wild boar that the hounds have driven into the toils.”28 Although much praised by the Swiss medical reformer Paracelsus, the mercury treatment was widely thought to be a form of torture worse than the disease itself.
Although the empirics’ interventions may have had no more therapeutic effect than the regimens of Galenic medicine, unlike the latter, they sometimes produced violent physiological changes. When dramatic bodily alterations (such as prolonged bouts of vomiting) were followed by relief of symptoms, sufferers naturally established a causal relation between the remedy [163]and the cure. Even if the “cure” was simply a spontaneous remission of the disease’s symptoms, the empirics’ remedies appeared more efficacious than the physicians’ mild regimens, which did not seem to bring about any physiological changes at all. Thus the French pox was perfectly suited to the “medical self-fashioning” of empirics, who challenged orthodox medicine with remedies that really seemed to work.29
Not much is known about Fra Volpe’s treatment for Mal francese; only that he made it in a distillery in the Campo dei Frari. It is significant, however, that the friar’s small library contained only one medical book, Leonardo Fioravanti’s Capricci medicinali, which is devoted almost entirely to alchemical cures—that is, drugs made by distillation.30 Moreover, when the Inquisitors questioned Fioravanti, they learned that he had spoken to the friar “numerous times” about medical matters.
In the 1560s, Leonardo Fioravanti was widely known in Italy as the founder of a sort of alternative medical system. He called it “the new way of healing.” And what was the “new way”? To begin with, it was founded on the belief that disease was a form of physiological pollution that began in the stomach and then proceeded to infect the entire body. Mal francese, he wrote in the Capricci medicinali, is “a corrupt and putrid contagion that offends all parts of the body.”31 Accordingly, his treatments of syphilis relied on drugs that purged the body of “pollutions.” To attack the corruption of the body, he had an imposing armory of emetics and purgatives whose active agents included hellebore, veratrum, antimony, and mercury. His favorite drug was Il precipitato, or precipitate of mercury (mercuric oxide, HgO), served up in an ounce of sugared rosewater. Precipitato was a strong drug all right. A deadly poison in large or prolonged doses, mercuric oxide is in small doses a powerful vomitive. Indeed, one of the most prominent features of Fioravanti’s therapeutics is the frequency with which he recommended violent purgations. At times his treatments took on truly heroic dimensions. To cure a Palermitan merchant of the French pox, he prescribed a regimen of drugs, including a good dose of precipitato, which caused the patient to vomit four to five times before being purged three times per day for ten days. When the man’s physician witnessed this, Fioravanti reported, “he was stupified, seeing such a miracle.”32
To Fioravanti, corruption and contagion were not merely physiological; they carried weighty ideological and moral overtones. To him, diseases were both moral and physiological corruptions. Syphilis carried the double stigma of being a disease both hideous in its effects and one associated with sexual [164]promiscuity.33 To sixteenth-century observers, it was a deserved punishment for immoral living. Fioravanti did not believe the Native Americans gave the Europeans syphilis. Instead, he maintained that the Europeans brought it on themselves, when, during the siege of Naples, unscrupulous provisioners sold soldiers the flesh of dead bodies and the starving troops unwittingly engaged in acts of cannibalism.34 His bizarre theory of the origins of syphilis made the disease a penalty for violating a universal taboo against eating the flesh of one’s own kind, and attributed the sickness to a corruption that proceeded from the stomach to the entire body.35
Mal francese became an important actor in the drama of Volpe’s fall. As a character, it played several important symbolic roles. First of all, it was a retribution for sin. The due reward of unbridled lust, the French pox was the living hell that debauched souls brought upon themselves and a constant reminder of God’s justice.36
Mal francese also played a role in the unfolding drama of salvation. Widely believed to be incurable, it personified death and decay, the end of all human life. Yet the revulsion of syphilitics, a reaction brought about by fear of contact, also underscored the holiness of charity and the compassion of those who cared for victims of the disease. The French pox was known as the “disease of Saint Job” because of its association with the mysterious scourge that afflicted the biblical patriarch.37 The drama of Job’s suffering, whom God permitted Satan to afflict with “a malignant sore covering him from the sole of his feet to the top of his head,” seemed to be reborn in those who endured the terrible and mysterious new disease.38 Although the cult of Saint Job was long-standing and widespread in Europe, largely due to the spread of the French disease, it peaked in the sixteenth century. As the patron saint of Mal francese victims, Job symbolized the holiness of the suffering that occurred as a consequence of an incomprehensible scourge. Excluded from the regular hospitals, the malfranciosati were cared for in special ospedali degli incurabili (hospitals for incurables) that were instituted by confraternities in most of the major Italian cities, and many of which were dedicated to Saint Job.39
As a healer, Fra Volpe keyed into these cultural signals. He anointed the sores of the afflicted in fearless disregard of the conventional dread of physical contact with the malfranciosati, and dosed patients with drugs that cleansed the evil from their bodies. A priest, alchemist, and healer who touched the sickness’s loathsome sores, Fra Volpe was a Christian shaman. [165]He could not have cured syphilis (although his medicines might have given some relief from the painful skin eruptions that accompanied the disease), yet he gave patients something more powerful than ordinary medicine could provide. As Lévi-Strauss put it, the shaman provides the sick person with a language that “render[s] acceptable to the mind pains which the body refuses to tolerate.” The shaman calls upon a myth—in this case the Christian myth of the suffering of the innocent—that makes it possible “to undergo in an ordered and intelligible form a real experience that would otherwise be chaotic and inexpressible.”40 Fra Volpe’s healing touch evoked powerful religious symbolism, reintegrating a disordered physiological state within a whole where suffering becomes meaningful. Even the friar’s imposing figure seemed to add to his persona. A big man with a black beard, he always dressed in the habit of his order, its pristine whiteness doubtless stained with soot from the alchemical furnace and its black cape pocked with holes burned by the coals. The Great Pox propelled Fra Volpe to notoriety and made him vulnerable to those envious of his secret.
Dozens of witnesses were called to testify in Volpe’s trial. Given the friar’s fame, it is not surprising that his troubles with the Inquisition were generally known among the circles of healers, distillers, and alchemists around Venice. The distillery in Campo dei Frari was a favorite meeting place of alchemists and empirics, who were always interested the latest concoction that might be brewing there. The friar was often seen in the pharmacies, including the “Bear,” where Leonardo Fioravanti practiced, and his secrets were much sought after by the empirics.41 Soon Volpe learned that his accuser was the physician Decio Bellobuono, with whom he had done business at the distillery in Campo dei Frari. Like Volpe, Decio was originally from the South, and had emigrated with his father, Prudentio, and his two brothers, Galeno and Propertio. After settling in Verona in the 1560s, the family moved to Padua, where Decio attended the university. Decio was well connected with the Venetian literary circles. A member of the tony Accademia della Fama, he published a work on the French Disease and wrote a sonnet to the Marchesa del Vasto.42
Suspicions about Volpe’s orthodoxy had actually surfaced earlier, however, in fact at least a month before his arrest, when the rumor began to spread that he had been decapitated in Naples as a Lutheran heretic. It was also rumored that he didn’t believe in the intercession of the saints, that he declared Saint Mary of Loreto to be the pope’s whore, and that he [166]proclaimed that Lutheran Germany was the “promised land and the Elysian fields.” As the case proceeded, other damaging testimony concerning Volpe’s personal life and religious orthodoxy emerged. There was a rumor that the friar wanted to throw off the habit and marry a woman from Padua, another that he had already married her and had a child by her, while others had heard that he said the sins of the flesh were not so bad, “because man leans that way.” It was even rumored that he planned to leave Italy and go to a monastery in Austria, in a remote place called Terra Domini or Terra Santa, where “people lived in a saintly and plentiful manner [santamente et abondantemente].”43
In densely populated Venice, where neighborhoods spilled over into one another and windows opened onto tiny courtyards, rumor and gossip played an important part in people’s affairs. It was difficult to keep a secret in Venice and privacy “was a luxury that even most patricians could not afford.”44 Gossip was useful to the Holy Office. It turned up suspects and made denunciations almost casual. As Volpe’s trial proceeded, rumor proved extremely damaging to his case. Even the booksellers talked about him; the physician Domenico della Cava testified that he heard from the proprietor of the Salerno bookshop that Volpe owned several heretical books.
Decio Bellobuono counted on the gossip network in contriving his plot to frame Volpe. In fact, it turned out it was the Bellobuoni who were actually responsible for the rumors that got the friar in trouble in the first place—or at least that’s what people said. The summer before Volpe’s arrest, the friar had gone to Puglia to make aqua vitae, taking along with him Decio’s younger brother Propertio, who wanted to learn the art.45 While there, Propertio met a rich widow and schemed to marry her for her property. Posing as a Venetian merchant awaiting a shipload of goods from Venice, he courted the widow and made promises to her, hoping that she would succumb to his solicitations. When Fra Volpe learned of the scheme, he went to the woman’s relatives and told them that Propertio was no rich merchant at all, but just a young wastrel seeking easy gain. His design on the widow ruined, Propertio returned to Venice and began spreading the rumor that the friar had been arrested in Naples and executed for heresy.
When Fra Volpe returned unexpectedly to Venice in January 1567, the rumors about his heretical religious beliefs, his supposed concubine, his troubles in Naples, and his suspicious reading habits were well known all around town. As the authorities began to probe more deeply into his case, however, other troubling information surfaced. Practically everyone who knew Volpe testified that when they heard about his denunciation, [167]they suspected it had to do with the business transactions between him and Decio Bellobuono. The details are murky and the testimony is contradictory, but the substance of the affair can be made out with reasonable certainty.
Fra Volpe’s drugs, which he made at the distillery in the Campo dei Frari, brought him handsome profits. Soon he was lending money to various empirics and distillers around Venice. A few years before his trial, he had loaned Decio Bellobuono 200 ducats so that Decio could purchase the distillery under his brother’s name, since it was illegal for a physician to own a pharmaceutical establishment.46 When Volpe tried to collect the money owed him, Bellobuono refused to pay up, and when the friar threatened to take legal measures to collect the debt, Bellobuono denounced him to the Inquisition. But if the Bellobuoni could defame the Canker Friar to get out of paying their debt, it was a game that two could play; for Volpe knew a secret about the Bellobuoni and their unsavory past, and he was now prepared to reveal it.
Volpe began to take charge of his case. He requested that other witnesses be examined and brought forth documents supporting his case. He charged the Bellobuoni of “seducing” false testimony and stirring up dissension in the Gambarare church. When the inquisitors began looking into the countercharges, they discovered that Decio himself had taken an unusual interest in Lutheranism, having pressed a confessed heretic for information about the doctrine. Was Decio’s curiosity about Protestantism aimed at making his charges against Volpe credible?
Then the Canker Friar broke his silence and revealed his secret about the Bellobuoni. Not only was the heresy charge a frame-up to avoid repaying the loan, he declared, but the entire Bellobuono family had been banished from Naples for their involvement in a robbery and murder. Decio’s real name, he asserted, was Jacomo da Campania. Convicted of treason and murder, he fled with his family and migrated to Venice, where they changed their name to “Bello e buono,” or “Fine and Good.” As the Inquisition began to probe more deeply into the family’s past, Decio marshaled several well-connected witnesses to testify on his behalf. From this and other testimony, it becomes fairly clear that Volpe had made a number of enemies: some of the witnesses were physicians who had little good to say about empirics, others owed the friar money, and some were distillers who [168]seemed eager to get back at Volpe for refusing to reveal his secret cure and to thus eliminate a competitor from the medical marketplace.
From his prison cell, Fra Volpe doggedly protested his innocence and repudiated one by one the accusations of the Bellobuoni. Refusing to give in to the Inquisition’s intimidations, he insisted on reviewing the trial testimony. In January 1568, he wrote an impassioned plea to the authorities proclaiming his innocence and refuting the Bellobuoni’s accusations. The deposition laid out the details of the loan and Bellobuono’s refusal to repay it, and charged Decio with intimidating witnesses to make false testimony against him. Volpe insisted that he had always preached orthodox doctrine at Gambarare and pointed out that while in prison he had converted two heretics. He denied owning any heretical books and claimed that he had only a breviary, a psalter, and a copy of Fioravanti’s Capricci medicinali, which he used in his practice. Finally, in February 1568, evidently eager to bring the case to a close, the Inquisition abruptly dismissed the charges and set Volpe free. As much as anything, the friar had simply worn the Inquisition down.
Yet as far as Volpe was concerned, the case was not over. After his release from prison, he determined to get back at the Bellobuoni and clear his name. He requested that new witnesses be called and that former witnesses be reexamined in order to have his “honor and name restored.” He produced hard evidence to support his case, including letters of credit in Propertio’s name dating from 1565, when the transaction took place, as well as witnesses who confirmed his story about the loan to Decio. The proceedings dragged on for another six months. Eventually the Paduan authorities lost patience. They had heard enough and wanted to bring the affair to an end once and for all. In July, the Holy Office concluded its investigation, evidently without resolving the case in favor of either party.
Who gets the last word in this sordid tale of war waged by lies, rumor, blackmail, and false accusations? Volpe, it appears. Although he vanished from history after his trial, he lent his voice to another man in similar desperate circumstances. In July 1568, about the time the last witnesses were deposed in Volpe’s appeal, the Holy Office opened a case against Francesco Annovazzo, a solicitor who practiced at the Rialto. Arrested in early August, Annovazzo was conducted to San Giovanni in Bragora and incarcerated.47 Like Volpe, he had been denounced as a Lutheran and he spent the next eight months in jail defending himself against the charge.
At first glance, it seems that the Bellobuoni were up to their old tricks again, for, as the trial testimony reveals, Decio and Galeno owed the notary money and refused to pay their debt. Did the Bellobuoni try to frame [169]Annovazzo as they had framed the friar? That is what Annovazzo claimed and to prove his case, he used a clever stratagem: he brought forth the record of Fra Volpe’s trial with its squalid details of the Bellobuoni’s shady past, their lies and rumormongering, and their false denunciations. He hurled a litany of countercharges, calling Decio (among other things) an assassin, a fugitive, a seducer, a buyer of false testimony, a spy, a liar, and a traitor. Just as he had framed Volpe, Annovazzo charged, so Decio had falsely accused him in order to avoid paying his debt. Decio, evidently feeling the noose tightening around his own neck, wrote an apologetic letter to Annovazzo, still in prison, explaining how “infinitely astounded” he was that the lawyer could make such accusations, since “I’ve always held you in my soul and my conscience to be a gentleman and a good Christian.”48 Although Annovazzo, under torture, was made to confess to having held Lutheran beliefs, his vigorous self-defense brought to light information that badly tarnished the reputation of Bellobuoni.
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Few events are more terrifying or more demoralizing than the sudden and unexpected appearance of new diseases. As the panic following the outbreak of the AIDS epidemic demonstrated, the feeling of helplessness before forces we cannot see and do not understand can arouse fear and paranoia. Blaming the other is one possible response to new diseases; another is to blame oneself. During the recent outbreak of hantavirus in the American Southwest, the Navajo people believed they had brought the disease upon themselves because of the failure to follow traditional Navajo ways.49 And everyone in early modern Italy agreed that the root cause of all pestilence was God’s wrath visited upon a sinful people. Whether perceived as having come from within as the result of some moral failing or from malevolent forces from the outside, new diseases bring out a culture’s deepest phobias.
Diseases are not just germs; they are relationships between microbes and hosts in which both sides have a history. Unlike animals, which experience diseases on a biological level but who do not socially construct their ailments, humans erect elaborate intellectual frameworks for understanding and controlling illness. The process of framing diseases inevitably involves an accounting for why certain persons (and not others) suffer from a particular disease. For this reason, disease helps frame debates about society.50 [170]The disparity between sickness and health that illness punctuates provides a ready metaphor for the perceived gap between what is and what ought to be. These disparities are especially glaring during epidemics such as plague and with the appearance of new diseases such as syphilis.51
This essay has discussed some of the ways in which plague and syphilis worked as social and religious metaphors. How might these observations lead to a deeper understanding of the trial of Antonio Volpe? And, conversely, how might Volpe’s trial increase understanding of the social and cultural impact of new diseases? There is a route, albeit a somewhat speculative one, toward finding answers to those questions.
One important clue to understanding Volpe’s predicament is his immigrant status. In the trial record, he is always identified by his origins in Ferrandina in the far south of Italy. His speech, punctuated by the distinctive accent that characterized the dialect of the region, would have earmarked him as a man from the countryside. Even while living in Venice, the trial documents reveal, he had no settled or permanent domicile, staying with this person and that, shuttling back and forth between borrowed residences in Venice and the Terra Firma. In other words, even though Volpe had become a fixture in Venice, he was always thought of as an itinerant healer.
By Volpe’s time, the image of the itinerant healer had already evolved into a well-defined literary trope. Described in travel narratives and guidebooks as well as in a growing number of treatises critiquing the errors of medicine, the itinerant healer was an endless source of fascination for tourists and a constant presence in the Piazza San Marco, where they typically set up their portable stages and sold their remedies.52 There were the pauliani, snake handlers who claimed descent from Saint Paul, sold antidotes against venomous bites, and sometimes competed in snake-handling competitions, occasionally with fatal or near-fatal results.53 Then there were ciarlatani, whom the English traveler Fynes Moryson described in the following way:
They are called montibanchi or mounting banks or little scaffolds, and also ciarlatani of prating. They proclaim their wares upon these scaffolds, and to draw concourse of people they have a zani or fool with a visard on his face, and sometimes a woman, to make [171]comical sport. The people cast their handkerchiefs with money to them, and they cast them back with wares tied in them . . . The wares they sell are commonly distilled waters and divers ointments for burning aches and stitches and the like, but especially for the itch and scabs, more vendible than the rest. Some carry serpents about them and sell remedies for their stinging, which they call the grace of St. Paul, because the viper could not hurt him. Others sell Angelica of Misnia at twelve pence English the ounce, naming (as I think) a remote country to make the price greater, for otherwise that cold country should not yield excellent herbs. Many of them have some very good secrets, but generally they are all cheaters.54
Cheats or not, charlatans, mountebanks, and pauliani were an important tourist attraction in sixteenth-century Venice, part of the standard repertoire of sights for anyone who visited the lagoon city. Indeed, the tourist trade played an important role in standardizing the practices of the charlatans, as visitors, tutored on guidebooks, expected to see scenes of theatrical healing acted out in the piazze.55
Although a staple of tourism, itinerant healers were also seen as a danger: drifting from city to city in troupes whose composition changed whenever they repacked their trunks, the ciarlatani were relatively free of the normal constraints imposed by society. As vagabonds, they had no clear legal status. They were accompanied by women of dubious reputation; they used charms, wore gaudy costumes, told vulgar jokes, and mocked the physicians in ridiculous burlesques that would later become (in politer circles) the basic elements of the commedia dell’arte. No wonder the authorities regarded the ciarlatani as dangerous to the moral fabric of the community. Cardinal Paleotti of Bologna declared that the mountebank’s comedies were excuses for youths to play truant and steal from their parents and employers. In times of heresy and pestilence, he warned, the crowding on the piazze to watch the spectacles was particularly undesirable.56
The growing criticism of itinerant healers in part mirrored the attitudes of the orthodox physicians, who saw the itinerant healers as competitors and wanted to monopolize the business of healing from above. Yet, as Katharine Park has suggested, these interests merely echo a broader and more important concern about the city as a moral and economic environment.57 The real issue, it seems, was fraud: whether you could trust those [172]with whom you dealt on the piazza every day. As Moryson noted of the ciarlatani, “They are all cheaters.” The cutthroat competition in the medical marketplace reflected the competitiveness of the money economy as a whole. In this sense, concerns about the trustworthiness of itinerant healers reflected more general anxieties about a market in which trading in unfamiliar goods from distant places became a daily occurrence.
Venice seemed particularly vulnerable to the dangers posed by the immigrant. Unlike most Renaissance cities, Venice was not surrounded by walls or moats. The sea protected it, but the sea also made it more permeable than other urban spaces, penetrable from an infinite variety of places and ever vulnerable to the dangers from without. In Venice, an open, porous city with a large population of immigrants, uneasiness about foreigners and exotic merchandise manifested itself in legislation against uncivil speech, laws regulating fraud in marketplace, and other measures.58
Although Fra Volpe was no mountebank, nor a member of a troupe of traveling entertainers, as an itinerant healer, he embodied both the physical dangers of the countryside and the healing power of its natural products. His remedies, including the precious aqua vitae from Puglia and the distilled essence that he used to treat the French pox, are reminiscent of the patent medicines that the ciarlatani peddled in the market squares. An immigrant from distant, rural Lucania, he traveled back and forth to the South to manufacture the healing “water of life” for which he was renowned. Mysterious, foreign, and dark, he possessed powerful and seductive healing secrets that he learned who knows where?
Volpe’s status as an itinerant healer thus made him vulnerable to the jealousy especially of physicians, who worried about competition. In fact, his principal accuser, Decio Bellobuono, was a physician. Yet the friar was also a lightning rod for concerns about the vulnerability of Venice’s urban space. Thus his trial may be read as a metaphor about relations between inside and outside, and between the city and the country. The uncertainties of the city’s relation to the countryside mirrored the uncertainties of the body’s relationship to its environment. Neither the body nor the city is autonomous; both are bound to their surroundings. Just as the health of the body is dependent on the outside for food, water, and air, so the health of the city depends on the flow of goods from without. The body’s nourishment comes from the outside, but so do the toxins that corrupt it. The city, too, depends upon the flow of goods and people from the outside; but with that flow come a host of social dangers. Purging the physical body of its toxins—the central metaphor of Renaissance popular healing—keyed into [173]a longing to purge the urban social body of its conflicts and its foreign influences.59
Plague and syphilis thus opened up—or rather, exacerbated—a debate about commercialization and its consequences. The decades following the Black Death were the decades of golden remedies. Elixirs, universal potions, and panaceas of all kinds became an increasingly important part of the healer’s arsenal. The search for the philosopher’s stone that would result in the perfect medicine reached an almost feverish pitch and the marketplace abounded in wonder drugs.60 At the same time, the niche in the medical economy opened up by the presence of a dreaded disease that appeared to be miraculously cured by a wonder drug was a perfect fit for entrepreneurial healers like Volpe, who made a lot of money on his remedies, enough to make substantial loans to other healers.
N
Nothing is heard about Fra Volpe after his unfortunate encounter with the Inquisition. Perhaps he did marry Donna Camilla, the widow rumored to be his concubine. Perhaps he left Venice and went to Austria. Maybe he did finally make it to that Holy Land where people live in common, in saintly ways, and with plenty. We shall probably never know. Like so many others, he disappeared in the mist of the past. And Decio? He contracted the plague during the epidemic of 1576 and died in the Lazaretto Nuovo. His son, Lelio, is heard in a pathetic plea to the Public Health Board to be allowed to recover his father’s meager goods.61
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1 ASV, Sant’Uffizio, b. 23, testimony of Francesco Vulpino, 9 April 1567. The busta consists of loose, unpaginated testimony, letters, and supporting documents. All references to the trial testimony, unless otherwise noted, are from this source.
2 For the procedures followed by the Venetian Inquisition, see Schutte, Aspiring Saints, chap. 2. On the organization of the Venetian Inquisition, see Del Col, “Organizzazione, composizione e giurisdizione.”
3 Arrizabalaga, Henderson, and French, Great Pox.
4 Erasmus, Colloquies, trans. Thompson, 1:401, 405.
5 The most recent and perhaps most uncompromising critique of the bubonic plague theory is Cohn, Black Death Transformed.
6 Boccaccio, Decameron, trans. McWilliam, 51–52.
7 “Plague” is the English equivalent of the Latin pestis; the form peste occurs in French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese, while in German, the equivalent is Pest. On the linguistic variants and uses of the word, see Martin, Plague? 71–73.
8 Carmichael, Plague and the Poor, chap. 1.
9 Cosmacini, Storia della medicina, 101–2.
10 Corradi, Annali delle epidemie, 1:395–98.
11 Fracastoro, De contagione, trans. Wright, 101–3.
12 Wylie and Collier, “English Sweating Sickness”; and Dyer, “English Sweating Sickness.”
13 Wylie and Collier, “English Sweating Sickness,” 431.
14 Hopkins, Princes and Peasants, 167–68. Rhazes considered the disease to be an almost salutary childhood distemper; Treatise on the Smallpox and Measles, trans. Greenhill, 29.
15 Fracastoro, De contagione, 72–73.
16 Carmichael and Silverstein, “Smallpox in Europe.”
17 Crosby, “Conquistador y Pestilencia”; and Cook, Born to Die.
18 Crosby, Columbian Exchange.
19 The origins of venereal syphilis (as opposed to other forms of Treponematosis such as yaws and pinta) have been fiercely debated, but most historians now agree that the disease was endemic in the New World and was carried to Europe by Columbus’s sailors on his return voyage from America. For an overview of the dispute, see Guerra, “Dispute over Syphilis.”
20 The most recent history of syphilis in the early modern period is Arrizabalaga, Henderson, and French, Great Pox. See also Quétel, History of Syphilis.
21 By “empirics,” I mean nongraduate medical practitioners; see Gentilcore, “Charlatans, the Regulated Marketplace and the Treatment of Venereal Disease in Italy.”
22 Arrizabalaga, Henderson, and French, Great Pox, 26.
23 Quétel, History of Syphilis, 28.
24 Arrizabalaga, Henderson, and French, Great Pox, 156.
25 Munger, “Guaiacum.”
26 Hutten’s De guaiaci medicina et morbo gallico (1519) provided the first European description of the guaiacum tree and its use for treating syphilis; see Munger, “Guaiacum,” 205–6.
27 Quétel, History of Syphilis, 58–63; and Arrizabalaga, Henderson, and French, Great Pox, 103–4, 139–42.
28 Rabelais, Histories of Gargantua and Panatruel, trans. Cohen, 167.
29 Eamon, “Pharmaceutical Self-Fashioning.”
30 On Fioravanti’s alchemy, see Eamon, “Alchemy in Popular Culture.”
31 Fioravanti, Capricci medicinali, 56r: “il mal francese è un morbo corrotto, e putrido, il quale offende tutte le parti del corpo.”
32 Fioravanti, Tesoro della vita humana, 36r–v: “resto tutto stupefatto, parendoli cosa miracolosa.”
33 Schleiner, “Moral Attitudes toward Syphilis.”
34 Fioravanti, Capricci medicinali, 51v.
35 Eamon, “Cannibalism and Contagion.”
36 Foa, “The New and the Old”; Schleiner. Medical Ethics; and Allen, Wages of Sin, chap. 3.
37 Arrizabalaga, Henderson, and French, Great Pox, 52–54, 150–52.
38 Job 2:7–8.
39 Malamani, “Notizie sul mal francese.”
40 Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, 197; and Burke. “Rituals of Healing,” 207–20, quote at 211.
41 The Bear pharmacy, run by Sabbà da Franceschi, is depicted in a painting of the Piazza Santa Maria Formosa by Canaletto (Campo Santa Maria Formosa, 1730, private collection) and still exists in its original sixteenth-century building. The pharmacy, in the left side of the picture, is easily identified by the apothecary’s jars in the window.
42 The sonnet was published in Ruscelli, Lettura di Girolamo Ruscelli, 77v.
43 ASV, Sant’Uffizio, b. 23, Testimony of Dominico de Juliis della Cava.
44 Horodowich, “Gossiping Tongue.”
45 Fioravanti, Tesoro, 146v, letter of March 1565 to Prudentio Bellobuono.
46 It may seem strange that Volpe, a Dominican friar, should have led such an apparently loose lifestyle, living by himself outside the community, making and loaning money, operating a distillery, and (so his accusers charged) living with a mistress. Although formally he lived and preached at Gambarare, evidently in practice, he stayed where he pleased. Yet there is no question that Volpe was a member of the Dominican order. All of the archival documents identify him as such and no witness ever questioned it. Nor was practicing alchemy or operating a distillery unusual for a friar: the Dominicans at Santa Maria Novella in Florence operated a profitable distillery (which still exists today, selling oil, soap, and perfume to tourists); while another order, the Gesuati (not to be confused with the Jesuits), or aquavitae brothers, as they were sometimes called, specialized in distillation and making cordials and elixirs; Mancini, L’Officina profumo-farmaceutica; and Zobi, “La Farmacia di S. Maria Novella.”
47 ASV, Sant’Uffizio, b. 27, 10v: “in la casone di S. Zuane in Bragola, dove sia dalli ministri del S.to Officio condotto in quella et securamente custodito.”
48 ASV, Sant’Uffizio, b. 27.
49 Schwarz, “The Explanatory and Predictive Power of History,” 375–401.
50 Thus in medieval and Renaissance Europe, plague epidemics often became occasions for imposing tight social controls that were particularly burdensome to the poor, although, since bubonic plague is not contagious, such measures would have had little effect on its course; Carmichael, Plague and the Poor. Similar constructions were made of leprosy; see Brody, Disease of the Soul; and Richards, Medieval Leper. On the social construction of illness, see Rosenberg, “Framing Disease,” 305–18.
51 On early responses to syphilis, see French and Arrizabalaga, “Coping with the French Disease,” 248–87.
52 Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature, chap. 7. See also Gentilcore, “‘Charlatans, mountebanks, and other similar people’”; and Katritzky, “Marketing Medicine.”
53 Montinaro, San Paoli dei serpenti.
54 Moryson, Fynes Moryson’s Itinerary, ed. Hughes, 424–25 (spelling modernized).
55 Park, “Country Medicine in the City Marketplace”; and Katritsky, “Marketing Medicine.”
56 Lea, Italian Popular Comedy, 311. See also, Katritsky, “Was Commedia dell’arte Performed by Mountebanks?”
57 For the following observations, I am indebted to Park, “Country Medicine,” 116–17.
58 On speech legislation in Venice, see Horodowich, “Civic Identity and the Control of Blasphemy.” On laws regulating the manufacture and sale of theriac, see Olmi, “Farmacopea antica e medicina moderna”; and Stössl, Lo spettacolo della triaca.
59 I owe these insights to Park, “Country Medicine,” 116–17.
60 Crisciani and Pereira, “Black Death and Golden Remedies.” See also, Pereira, “Mater Medicinarum.”
61 ASV, Provveditori alla Sanità, Reg. 734, 75r.