[Note: In the course of doing research, historians sometimes come across stories that seem to cry out to be told. Here’s one that I encountered in the Inquisition file in the Venetian State Archive a few years ago. It’s from Archivio di Stato, Venice, Sant’Uffizio, b. 23, containing the trial testimony of Antonio Vulpino, 9 April 1567. This blog is adapted from a longer article in which I try to interpret the documents. Here my aim is simply to tell the story.]

Campo San Lio, Venice, in a picture by Giovanni Mansueti depicting the Miracle of the Relic of the Holy Cross in Campo San Lio (Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice)

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, responded, “Padre, if you’re a good man, God will help you; but should you be otherwise, so much the worse for you.”

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, where 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 Protestant 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. Read more »